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“... those who don’t already know, these biographical details all apply to the author of the novel, Alan Sillitoe. This is to be a candidly, if not straightforwardly autobiographical work. It is also the concluding volume in the series that began with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Arthur Seaton, the leading figure in that novel, has here only a walk-on ...”

“... turn to the theatre pages with the excitement that I once did and although contemporaries like Alan Brien lacked Tynan’s flamboyant, showstruck, star-fucking excitement, he too was an invigorating critic to read ... Why Tynan was influential within the theatre is hard to explain.’ (Jonathan Miller, who likes explaining, is particularly interesting when ...”

“... of Algernon in two volumes, of which Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis is the second. Alan Craig Houston devotes a volume to his political thought. Scott, too, is concerned with Algernon’s political thought, but is more interested than Houston in the relationship of ideas to events. His biography has some of the qualities of its hero’s ...”

“... against the use of mobile phones is often ignored or not even acknowledged so that the occasional bold spirit will then protest and a row breaks out, and even when it doesn’t there’s often some unspoken resentment against offenders, who are often unaware. This morning our coach is quite subdued, no one uses a mobile, though the three of us talk quietly ...”

“... In Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution, Anthony Blunt instructs Her Majesty the Queen about pictures. ‘Because something is not what it is said to be, Ma’am, does not mean it is a fake.’ ‘What is it?’ she asks. Sir Anthony gingerly suggests: ‘An enigma?’ Here as in Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood, the figure of the spy illustrates the irreducibility of human and aesthetic mystery, the contradictions that all personalities enshrine, the confusion that no amount of pedantic energy can resolve ...”

“... settlement. Between 1390 and 1397 he was building up his retinue (the subject, incidentally, of Alan Bennett’s sadly abandoned doctoral thesis) and intervening in local quarrels so as to support friends and punish enemies. His second marriage and an expedition to Ireland both helped affirm his manly status. ‘Now, more than ever,’ Fletcher tells ...”

“... you will be delighted to know that a pub in the Yorkshire town of Otley is to be renamed the Alan Bennett in your honour in order to celebrate Yorkshire Day.’ Fortunately this bizarre baptism is only for a month; were it longer I fear it would soon be reflected in the takings. The body responsible for this kindly gesture is the Otley Pub Club, which ...”

“... Frank Davison’s tried and true translation of Le Grand Meaulnes. It is a handsome edition in bold type, rather like a child’s book, although Le Grand Meaulnes, whatever it is, is not a book for children. In 1959, in the World’s Classics, it had an introduction by Alan Pryce-Jones, who saw the book as ‘the last ...”

“... to a temperamental requirement for ‘definitive overviews, wholes which, thanks to their bold structure, arbitrary yet convincing, give the illusion of being a total picture of reality, of summing up all of life’; and the power of such summings-up is in their bold substitution of a somehow better world for the ...”

“... to provoke him. He seems to have been quite unflustered by the dignified element of office: the bold pinstriped suit, the morning coat and evening dress, were obviously just the togs of the trade to him. Bevin was uncomplexed as well as uncomplicated, and his instincts were as sound as a Bow bell. He could not find it in himself to dislike the upper ...”

“... in the Middle Ages, but their relationships were affirmed and sanctioned by the Church. This is a bold claim by a scholar who, as A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Chair of Yale’s history department, had every right to be taken seriously. Consequently, when the book was published in the US it caused a huge amount of controversy and even found its ...”

“... make readers’ experience purely cerebral. In one of many suggestive footnotes, Jackson describes Alan Bennett reading a library book in which a paragraph has been marked with a crooked line: ‘I pay the passage special attention without finding it particularly rewarding. As I turn the page the line moves.’ The line is a hair. The distinction between good ...”

“... and an indigenous present has been almost an assumption of Oceanic studies. The Fatal Impart was Alan Moorehead’s famous metaphor for it. But everywhere, not just in the Pacific, there has been a resurrection: histories now are of resistance, not just of that open resistance mercilessly crushed by empires, but of that hidden resistance which preserved ...”

“... of ignorant wickedness that constituted “tom-fool Protestant history”’. Macaulay was ‘a bold and resolute liar’ ever ready to suppress, distort and mis-state; inevitably a readiness to do just that was alleged against Belloc. Shaw’s view was more lenient: ‘Mr Belloc urges the view of history that the Vatican would urge if the Vatican were as ...”

“... one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless because Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) was published a little too late to be fitted into the fashionable grouping. Since the constituents of ...”