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“... heirs are not necessarily the infallible custodians of his or her political legacy. The fact that Alan Ryan’s view of Bertrand Russell and my own are very closely similar is not, therefore, proof that we are both right. It is merely proof that our perceptions are compatible with a thorough knowledge of the evidence, and perhaps reason for suspecting that he ...”

“... on the atom-bomb project between 1942 and 1945: Berti, or Engelbert Egon August Ernst Broda, and Alan Nunn May, who was sentenced to ten years for it. Broda, who probably had the longer record of relations with Moscow, was never tried though seen as heavily suspect by the British security services. As it happens, I knew or met all three as well as a very ...”

“... The only figures mentioned are the London allowance totals for last year, which show me in a good light, my claim being just over half those of my neighbours. There is also an editorial remarking on my general saintliness. I derive no satisfaction.  I scribbled a note to Elliot Morley, who whatever his sins, is a decent man and was an excellent ...”

“... But a great deal has been said about him ever since and no one has been better at saying it than Alan Bullock. His Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, published in 1952, is still the best biography, and one of the best books on the Nazi phenomenon in general. Only a very few other works come to mind which are in the same league: Konrad Heiden’s history of the Nazi ...”

“... included contributions concerning European history from Norman Cohn, Peter Brown, Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, all professional historians. They were fully integrated with the contributions of the anthropologists. Since that date it has become increasingly common both in this country and elsewhere for historians and social anthropologists to emphasise the ...”

“... about Michael and Julia, but we might just as well be sitting in two different buses at a traffic-light in Oxford Street. The Minister is in full swing. He is waxing smooth on the subject of library provision. He keeps calling local libraries ‘street corner universities’, as if this bit of whimsy will distract us from the fact that local libraries are ...”

“... and he would regale me with the details of the latest murder he had been called on to snap: ‘By, Alan, I’ve seen some stuff.’ The stuff he’d seen included the corpse of the stripper Mary Millington, who had committed suicide. ‘I can’t understand why she committed suicide. She had a lovely body.’ To someone as prone to embarrassment as I ...”

“... far as I know, there are no half-timbered terminal buildings or pebble-dashed control towers.’ Alan Warner isn’t a novelist you’d expect to be much interested in the departures hall, being best known for a sort of wild provincial fabulism. Each of his first five books is saturated with ‘place’, using skewed dialect and surreal local legend to ...”

“... This is a very long biography, and before it appeared Alan Turing was not very well-known; his genius was of a kind that is not likely to be spread abroad. An immense amount of work has gone into this book, which expresses profound, and sometimes almost obsessional, admiration. It is not hagiography, but rather a study of a hero, an intellectual hero ...”

“... kind of sophistication has yet to cause the generally football-appalled like myself to see the light. I have this bunch of pals in London who are mainly Scottish but who play in a team called the Battersea Juniors. They are more persuasive in this regard. The team is a bit up-and-down, a bit part-time, even for a Saturday league, but I went to see them ...”

“... whether they get through ‘more than ten a month’). These stories, in the view of the sapient Alan Boon, can be compared to Valium for women. But the Mills and Boon operation is such a high-powered one that the worldwide propagation of the attitudes it fosters perhaps ought to be worrying the anti-globalisation lobby. In 1998, according to McAleer, the ...”

“... affectionate. Unashamed of his emotions altogether, as I sat next to him at the funeral of Alan Bates’s son Tristan when he wept throughout. I haven’t always felt so kindly, as when he wrote plays in the 1970s I was very jealous of him (as, I believe, was Pinter). He could run up a play in a week or two, generally when he wasn’t getting anywhere ...”

“... wrote of Lenin as a man “hideous” and “dissolute”.’ This was a revelation, a new light on someone occasionally called unimpressive, often puritanical and fanatical, but never personally unattractive. Steiner gave no reference, but at a guess I turned to Isaac Deutscher’s Prophet Armed. Sure enough, on page 93 I found ...”

“... miseries were confined to Victorian mill, mining and shipbuilding communities. In the thriving light-industrial areas of the Midlands and Home Counties, the period leading up to the war was one of affluence and opportunity. If Jarrow represented the collapse of one world order, the Somerdale chocolate factory near Bristol and the Morris Motors plant at ...”

“... was a part is the defining event of our times. Our current political chaos has to be seen in the light of it. Modern democracy was an answer to a social and political problem. If they were to function at all, complex mass societies needed to produce information and knowledge about their territories, their resources and themselves. They needed to get that ...”