“... loneliness or the collapse of community.’ Add to the list Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and Alan Ehrenhalt’s The Lost City – which examines the decline of community as it once existed in 1950s Chicago – and it’s clear at least that those thinking about loneliness are not alone. Any number of reasons for social isolation have been put ...”

“... and by its servility to the very power it ostensibly rails against. It leads to Huey Long and Ross Perot, not to Walden.This makes it very hard to guess how many people, on learning of the Oklahoma explosion, made a little holiday in their hearts. The question was, in any case, overtaken at once by the appalling images of death and mutilation, and by the ...”

“... in 1951; five years later, Hancock’s Half Hour introduced two brilliant writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who between them created a character whose sense of social and intellectual confinement puts The Lavender Hill Mob’s bullion robbers in the shade and eventually – after Hancock had morphed into Harold Steptoe – blossomed into something like ...”

“... leaderless, just-in-time disorganised organisation didn’t seem to help. In the late 1990s Alan Greenspan ridiculed the fashionable notion that the dot-com economy could overturn the traditional laws of economic profit and loss: he called it ‘irrational exuberance’. There is now an irrational exuberance about the potential of social media: it’s ...”

“... twitching twat’. In his useful study of the US literary left, Exiles from a Future Time (2002), Alan Wald argues that Hayes’s ‘bitter meditations on class privilege’ had been transmuted into ‘untrammelled and misogynous violence’. This may have played a part in Hayes’s disappearance from public view; certainly his dislike of self-promotion ...”

“... worries about how easily people can be swayed by that alluring call.In January, Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, Soulja Boy and Nelly were listed as performers at events celebrating Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The announcement followed a wave of Black entertainers including Waka Flocka and the SlutWalk founder, reality TV star and social media influencer ...”

“... predominated in Mamet’s work since his classic plays American Buffalo (1977) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). Those plays put us inside his creepy – and now familiar – world of paranoia and mutual suspicion, of small-time tricksters, confidence men and salesmen, of the unstable identification of victim and victimiser, the world of male competition that ...”

“... at outrageous human cost to both black and white. In a superb chapter, ‘Towards Australia’, Alan Frost argues that the Aborigines were dispossessed, the convicts exiled and exploited, so that Britain might have a far-south strategic base which could also serve as an off-shore gaol, conveniently remote. Whatever fine words were spoken at the initial ...”

“... praised for being ‘smart enough to see the point’ of his directorial interventions; Jonathan Ross, ‘whose gifts I admired’, is said to ‘put a lot of emphasis on personal appearance, almost as if he had no talent’, though Terry Wogan and Harry Hill are commended more warmly. He signs off with a bulletin on his Pacific War novel: he might not live ...”

“... often – in a similar vein to fellow conservative challengers Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes, but more effectively. ‘He believed what he said. He didn’t have his finger up in the air to find out which way the wind was blowing.’ Bauer tells how as a child in 1964 he watched a Reagan speech endorsing Barry Goldwater, and told his father ...”

“... remembers ecstatically how ‘legend after legend’ arrived at the table. He counts them in: Alan Sugar, Carol Vorderman, Jonathan Ross, Miriam Stoppard, Tony Parsons. Even for someone who started his career in national journalism as a showbiz reporter on the Sun, these are pitifully undemanding exemplars of ...”

“... was not merely that he was a married man with extracurricular interests – he had sex with Robbie Ross for the first time in 1886 – but also that he was most famous for being mocked. No one took him seriously, except himself and his mother and his wife. Wilde’s lectures and poses were better known than his early plays or poems. For a while after his ...”

“... month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about my Diary prompts me to write to him. I remind him that when he and I last met several decades ago he was sitting astride a rocking-horse in Gloucester Crescent while he and Jonathan Miller made fun of sociologists (an easy ...”

“... instant celebrity to their speaking to and for their ‘low dishonest decade’. Julian Maclaren-Ross was happy to call his recollections Memoirs of the Forties, a decade of which he was so emblematic. But these were artistic and literary lumpings-together, handy tags for something which might in fact have spread over a much longer period (Pater’s most ...”

“... actress in a belated stage version of his prewar novel Afternoon Men – tell no tales. His friend Alan Ross, editor of the London Magazine, thought that surrounded by promiscuous friends, he may have simply found a vicarious pleasure, productive for his fiction, in observing them, while conducting his own marital life with the meticulous sexual ...”