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“... Army who slips the buxom Mrs Fox a couple of sausages on the side. (In his LRB Diary for 2002, Alan Bennett cited a letter from a Grantham evacuee reporting the rumour that Alderman Roberts was ‘thought to be into the black market’. It is tempting to imagine that this was where Thatcher learned her neoliberal ethics, but ‘a bit under the ...”

“... the Liberal Democrats and by the fact that three former Conservative MPs were standing for Labour: Alan Howarth and Shaun Woodward (both elected), and Alan Amos (ex-Hexham), who opposed Peter Lilley in Hitchin and Harpenden. The Liberal Democrats did well, but not uniformly. In addition to the two seats they lost, they came ...”

“... anyone to look after me. I’ve got a good housekeeper to darn my socks, sew on my buttons and cook my meals.’ White managed to dispense even with his housekeeper when, in the early Seventies, after linking up with Hanson, he went to America and launched his new business there from New York’s exceedingly expensive Pierre Hotel.) What was the nature of ...”

“... Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London resident, seems as English as they come. (So English, in fact, that he will object that his mother is Australian.) He simply makes it a more interesting condition than others succeed ...”

“... with profound insight into human nature.’ Writing almost twenty years ago in these pages, Alan Bennett paid tribute to the hair-trigger sensitivity of Goffman’s eye and ear: ‘Whole novels take place in footnotes’ (LRB, 15 October 1981). Much of what Goffman saw and heard was available to anybody – though it mainly skipped their notice – but ...”

“... the paper’s readers, and elicited the largest number of indignant letters, was written by John. Alan Sokal, a professor of mathematics at UCL and physics at NYU, had gone into battle against the postmodern theorists whom he accused – I’m simplifying but not greatly – of having no understanding of the concepts they borrowed from science, and no respect ...”

“... words – after the murder. In The Blue Dahlia, the net closes in on the returning veteran, Alan Ladd, suspected of killing the wife who betrayed him while he was at war. The murderer in Chandler’s script was the William Bendix character, Ladd’s war buddy, an amnesiac killer suffering from blackouts: playing Smerdyakov to ...”

“... Bauer he indulges in the fantasy of being a large piece of wood, pressed against the body of a cook ‘who is holding the knife along the side of this stiff log (somewhere in the region of my hip) slicing off shavings to light the fire’. Many conclusions could be drawn from this image, some glibber than others. One of them is that Kafka would have liked ...”

“... and started in Not Only But Also he set about acquiring one, thus considerably irritating Peter Cook who preferred him as he was. Peter’s drunkenness had a lot to do with them eventually breaking up but it was also that Dudley’s not entirely mistaken notion of self-fulfilment made further co-operation impossible. 8 December. I buy a bottle of organic ...”

“... in the long run than those who find their reflection a cause for congratulation. Take Peter Cook who, as a young man, always gazed at himself with both pleasure and interest, but for whom growing old must have been particularly depressing. Losing one’s looks means less to those who have no looks to lose. Or should, but this is not the whole truth of ...”

“... Captain Boyle at the Lyceum. Laurence Daly of the Miners’ Union, John Mackintosh MP, Robin Cook. The Hamilton by-election had taken place six months before, and the advent of the SNP had kicked Scottish politics into life. It was a talking rather than a dancing party, and the politics themselves seemed intoxicating enough. Around two we processed ...”

“... her first collection of stories, Encounters, in 1923, when she was 24; that year she also married Alan Cameron, who worked first in education and then in schools’ broadcasting for the BBC. The marriage worked – Bowen liked making a home, and entertaining – and lasted as a fond childless companionship (though she had passionate love affairs) until ...”

“... well-worn anecdotes. Moorcock sketches his version of the late Derek Raymond (a.k.a. Robin Cook) as a Soho revenant: ‘Cookie was still alive in those days . . . and telling your stories back to you faster than you could recount them.’ Much of King of the City is like that, using the ‘twist’ to reconstitute chat rehearsed by Moorcock in the ...”

“... his fame – A true wit wouldn’t hint it, much less crow it. Poor knackered Nicky thinks he’s Alan Coren: He’s just a wee laird with a twitching sporran. And yet it’s wise to give conceit expression – Within the limits set by the absurd. A boast might be self-serving like Confession But similarly festers if unheard. Much meekness stands revealed ...”

“... couple who alternate between starving and gorging themselves. (The novel was turned into a film by Alan Parker, starring Anthony Hopkins, John Cusack and Bridget Fonda.) In A Friend of the Earth Boyle turns his squinting attention to environmentalism, creating a disconcerting marriage of farce and prophecy: he doesn’t doubt the looming apocalypse; he merely ...”