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“... in spite of the authoritative nature of their church.’ The second longest entry is on Henry Moore, that £1 million-a-year taxpayer whose sculpture was (and perhaps still is) prominently displayed in fifty cities and two hundred museums. Wisely, he retrained from philosophising and left the interpretation of his work to others. He was ‘the maker ...”

“... I was reading – and then reviewing for this very publication – a biography of Franz Liszt by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of ...”

“... indifferent private press books – would not by themselves have warranted a book on the scale of Alan Crawford’s admirable biography. It is Ashbee’s attempts to give practical expression to the idea that art matters that make Crawford’s apology for a book ‘more ponderous than its subject deserves’ unnecessary. Ashbee’s ideas were a legacy of ...”

“... of rock’s establishment is obvious, and was noted over five years ago in Q magazine by DJ Mark Moore of S-Express: ‘It’s the same reaction old fogies had when rock & roll first started.’ For the Sixties generation, however, the electric guitar is a more authentic instrument of human expression than a digital sampler. Thus DeCurtis, in a summary of ...”

“... was an unfortunate pedagogue pilloried in schoolboy sketches by Jarry and his friends; or of Alan Coren’s Idi Amin, who amid his slaughtering pranks sends up ‘fo’ de Boys Own Paper Giant Packet o’ One Hunnerd Top Worl’ Stamps fo’ A Mere Shillin”, orders his radio equipment from Hamleys, and wants a cowboy suit for his ‘birfday’. The ...”

“... words ‘bitter’ and ‘dependable’. In ‘Remembering Malibu’, a poem addressed to Brian Moore, he writes of the island monastic site of Great Skellig:                      the steps cut in the rockI never climbedbetween the graveyard and the boatslipare welted solid to my instep.Again, that ‘cutting edge’ between ‘I never ...”

“... cousins and relatives, the church figuring among his inspirations much as Methley did for Henry Moore. 21 May. An absurd accident. I am cycling down Gloucester Avenue this morning when my raincoat catches between the brake block and the wheel and brings me to a halt. Normally when this happens a step or two back reverses the wheel and frees the coat but not ...”

“... on rummaging through Larkin’s bottom drawer’). For Peter Riley, the failure of Nicholas Moore, another of the predecessors, to break through to a wider readership (bigger publishers) after his success in the Forties proves ‘that poetry-in-public ... was already completely useless in the Sixties for any purpose except re-endorsing the ...”

“... a canvas on which majestic incompetence would be painted on a grander scale than ever before. Alan Clark’s The Donkeys was one of the first forays into the study of institutionalised military idiocy. More recently, after the glories of the Gulf War, American generals rejected intervention in Bosnia with the words, ‘We do deserts, we don’t do ...”

“... of a column on the Telegraph when he was proprietor. This was naturally embarrassing for Charles Moore, the editor, and annoying for the rest of the staff or, as Amiel puts it, a ‘small but vocal-in-corners group’ of them. Amiel sought the advice of William (Bill) Deedes, a former editor, a ‘seminal figure at the paper’ and all-round representative ...”

“... And change is bound to come. Some parts of the organisation have already experienced it. Chris Moore’s Going Gone: How Newsrooms Die is the latest and best-written in a series of memoirs chronicling the recent history of the BBC and specifically the World Service.* Moore and I were both World Service lifers, but never ...”

“... those condemned to live in fallout shadows dig and scrape. A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly employed on the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Dagenham, contacted me to pass on his research into a tunnel he claimed to have discovered running from Sutton House, a Tudor mansion on the ridge above the culverted Hackney ...”

“... in this respect. Around half of his poetry is written in syllabics (he paid tribute to Marianne Moore, confessing that he’d stolen a great deal). The mode, he explained, was an attempt to escape from a conventional pattern of iambics and trochees without losing ‘the sense of pattern’, and this ambivalent relationship with structure is one of his ...”

“... a hint of condescension here. There are open seams in the plotting. Katherine’s besotted editor, Alan, works on her new novel, Consequences, till the last possible moment: ‘It had been a terrible wrench when he handed the typescript to his assistant to get it biked over to the Elysian people on that final afternoon.’ So the prize isn’t for published ...”

“... And it remains pretty well known: the quirkiest testimony to its renown comes in The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett’s play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, when two of the wrinkles come alive and engage in a brief dialogue about themselves. As its furrows gradually deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard ...”