“... of war. The comic potential of Auden’s rackety life has famously been drawn on in these pages in Alan Bennett’s ‘The Wrong Blond’, a review of Dorothy Farnan’s memoir Auden in Love; Davenport-Hines, I told myself, might well be less indulgent. As it happens, I was dead wrong: Auden is a work of impassioned praise, less a biography than a literary ...”

“... than the UK’s subsidy to Scotland? The voters are alienated from Labour, and the SNP has been riding high in the opinion polls, creating the possibility that it might become the largest party at Holyrood after the election. If this happens, it is long-standing SNP policy that there would be a referendum on independence. The third element of this historic ...”

“... Lucas has made unassumingness his gimmick. Physically small (shorter, as a photograph shows, than Alan Ladd), he has sometimes been mistaken for a handyman on his own set. He doesn’t smoke, drink, take drugs or eat sweets. He thinks TV is ‘amoral’, though he used to enjoy watching Walter Cronkite at 9 p.m., after the day’s work had been done. He has ...”

“... parody of the industrial worker, as represented by Albert Finney in Karel Reisz’s film of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The most exciting young actor of his generation tracked across the Nottingham cobbles, as Cameron was tracked through Notting Hill, by an unseen camera car. The liberation of moving through a city ...”

“... Goldman Sachs’s Robert Rubin to preside over the American economy, and retained and deferred to Alan Greenspan, Clinton has obviously been a good President for the business community. Indeed, he’s been so pro-business that he could not be successfully attacked by Republicans for his economic policies. So why should businessmen, who are nothing if not ...”

“... was crowded. Couldn’t get in,’ her brother Carrol Waymon recalled of her initial wallop, in Alan Light’s gossipy What Happened, Miss Simone?, ‘inspired’ by Liz Garbus’s 2015 documentary of the same name. The gravity and grace of her performance – her moody interpolation of lyrics played against a filigree of dissonant chord clusters – was a ...”

“... Apollonian. The novel is William Beckwith’s account of summer 1983, during which he was ‘riding high on sex and self-esteem – it was my time, my grande époque.’ Will is 25, from a recently aristocratic family (his grandfather was ennobled for his services as Director of Public Prosecutions during the Fifties): he is ...”

“... Somme that formed the inspiration for Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War. Its author was Alan Clark. He at least did not pretend that Generals Haig and French, unlike Privates Scargill and Heathfield, were not responsible for a million dead.)To all this invocation of high and evasive metaphor, Milne opposes one hard and fast, earthy injunction. It ...”

“... at a set time in the future. None of the usual market-moving factors had caused the excitement. Alan Greenspan hadn’t said anything; neither the dollar nor the stock market had suddenly plunged or soared. Instead, a trader had started using the lid of a large plastic tub as a frisbee. The lull of that morning in 1999 was temporary: the markets were quiet ...”

“... husband, in Finchley in 1959 did not, however, see the end of the matter. In 1961 the Liberals, riding the wave of Jewish protest, attacked every ward in Finchley for the first time and in 1962 they won every single ward there, as well as three of the five Friern Barnet wards. It was suddenly clear that Mrs Thatcher was in real trouble. In 1959, she’d ...”

“... to the record sleeve, Bowie played most of the guitar on Diamond Dogs (1974) himself. But Alan Parker, whose contribution is acknowledged for only one song, ‘1984’, perhaps deserves more credit than that. Of the guitar part on ‘Rebel Rebel’, Parker told Trynka: ‘I can tell my own playing, and my own sound, and I know it’s me.’ Diamond ...”

“... swags of beard at the corners of his jaw, like a playing-card king’s’). At the same age Jo, riding a 54 bus, observes white girls whose thongs show above the back of their low-rise jeans (‘God, what a stupid fashion’) and black boys with ‘heads shaved into cryptic sigils, getting on and off in obedience to the invisible frontiers of their postcode ...”

“... mocking the awkward aspirations of the nouveaux riches, sending children to public schools, riding to hounds, fonder of horses than of reading, dividing the working class into the deserving poor and the probably criminal, sometimes casually though not always consciously racist, and committed to the conventional gender roles that comedy has traditionally ...”

“... Ego’ as we have come to know it in English, rendered literally in this new translation by Alan Bance as the ‘I’ (together with the ‘It’ and – an odd hybrid – the ‘Super-I’). In ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, much the longest of the 11 papers on therapeutic technique collected here under the title Wild Analysis, Freud describes how ...”

“... Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA), which had collected testimony from hundreds of prisoners. Alan Beith, chair of the select committee, concluded that the law was ‘so complex that juries might find it impossible to understand how to reach the right verdict’. The committee recommended that the doctrine be enshrined in legislation, which would clarify ...”