“... is Evliya Çelebi’s celebration of slave boys proffered by their owner, ‘radiant as congealed light’. The Ottoman world was not a sodomite’s paradise, though. Malcolm emphasises that Çelebi’s radiant slaves were ‘vulnerable and powerless’. And desire between adult men was always a different matter: a normal man could desire a boy, and even ...”

“... writing about Nazism is little short of a disgrace. British work is characterised by reference to Alan Bullock’s biography of Hitler, Taylor’s idiosyncratic Origins of the Second World War and Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler. In the chapter on West German historians, the most recent reference is to Karl Dietrich Bracher’s The German ...”

“... just have chips,’ they said, as though this were a gesture of tremendous originality. Alan Clark, a judge of the 1995 AT&T prize, and the chief advocate of Coming Back Brockens, argued that it was ‘the most fun’, and that choosing it in preference to its rivals – Juliet Barker’s The Brontës and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom ...”

“... as its Parliamentary consultant, Midlands Electricity has Andrew Hargreaves and National Power has Alan Hasel-hurst. Sir Malcolm Thornton is Parliamentary consultant to North West Water. British Aerospace and Cable and Wireless are both clients of Sir Michael Marshall. Sir Giles Shaw is a director of British Steel. It is not surprising that the privatised ...”

“... Number Nine’, or ‘Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere’, came to light. (The journalist who leaked it, Gao Yu, was sentenced to seven years in prison and is currently under house arrest.) Document Number Nine warned of ‘the following false ideological trends, positions and activities’: ‘promoting Western constitutional ...”

“... they work for Warren Buffett; in Birmingham, Cardiff and Plymouth, the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company; in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund. More than anyone, you’d think, it would matter to the people who made these arrangements possible ...”

“... its funeral rites when Labour came to power seven years later. Yet at the turn of the millennium, Alan Milburn replaced Dobson and Labour introduced a new, more radical version of that market. It was Labour that introduced foundation trusts, allowing hospital managers to borrow money and making it possible for state hospitals to go broke. It was Labour that ...”

“... in the Times Literary Supplement often feature the talents of American neo-conservatism – Alan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Joseph Epstein, Hilton Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one ...”

“... see through a door of the main gallery into the huge adjoining studio at the back – a massive light-filled warehouse-space, the size of a basketball court – filled with adults of all sizes, ages and ethnicities. A deafening cacophony emanates from the studio: squeals, laughter, brash cries, along with an ongoing burble and roar of voices – a ...”

“... close-up inserts. The most unusual aspect of the film is the musique concrète soundscape by Alan Splet (whom Lynch discovered making industrial films in Philadelphia), particularly the low rumbling noise that returns in nearly every Lynch project. Like the shrill wind soughing through Fellini’s films, overdubbed and not always aligned with the ...”

“... out to be one of the ‘most amusing’ of books. This remark may have to be interpreted in the light of the fact that Stephen’s own preferred form of ‘amusement’ involved hanging by his fingertips from a ledge on the Matterhorn in the middle of a blizzard, but it is true that an abundance of pleasure, of a certain kind, is to be had from the 60 ...”

“... portraits of Roth in his former lover Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies, his former protégé Alan Lelchuk’s Ziff: A Life? and his former protégée-lover Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry – it may feel at times as if we’ve made this expedition before, with Claire Bloom hovering overhead.But buoyancy carries the reader along even in the thick of ...”

“... questions to toxic identity issues and may derail the country’s nascent democracy; in this light, the Islamist aspect of the Libyan rebellion should put us on our guard. It is among several reasons to ask whether what we have been witnessing is a revolution or a counter-revolution. The rebels’ name has changed several times in the Western media’s ...”

“... remembered, ‘Oscar had longish hair and wore an outfit that spoke of bohemian credentials: light-coloured trousers, a black frock coat, brightly coloured waistcoats with a white silk cravat held with an amethyst pin and always carrying lavender gloves.’ ‘It is at the Grosvenor Gallery,’ Wilde wrote in 1879, ‘that we are enabled to see the ...”

“... from England before its accession to the Common Market, in the pioneering reconstruction of Alan Milward.This has finally changed. In the last decade Europe has generated a set of thinkers about its integration who command the field, while the US, increasingly absorbed in itself, has largely vacated it. Among these, one stands out. By reason of both the ...”