“... thought, she is too eclectic and inconsistent in her methodology (as suggested by the savaging Alan Ryan gave her book on Mill); while to hard-nosed historians of political action, she seems altogether too preoccupied with ideology (as shown by the severe criticisms of her attempt to analyse the passing of the Second Reform Bill in these terms). For the ...”

“... than the Book of Revelation. Orwell had Eton and the military police to draw on for 1984, and Alan Moore (V for Vendetta) had Orwell. What’s interesting is that for this ‘entirely new departure’ James stayed so close to the sense that runs through all her work of the horror of human intimacy, of touch (‘a collection of bones loosely held together ...”

“... a discourse on culture as if Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin, Kristeva, Barthes and Foucault, Williams, Eagleton and many others had never existed. My intellectual disagreements with Peter Fuller in the last years of his life turned on his espousal of this complacency, his attempt to give some theoretical and ethical substance to this Establishment ...”

“... with colleagues like Cecil Sharp (whose ideas about folk-song were later endorsed by Vaughan Williams) were superficially about Grainger’s pioneering use of the phonograph. But Sharp’s hard-nosed rejection of the infernal machine as the only means of accurately transcribing folk-song had less to do with practicalities (Grainger’s transcriptions ...”

“... masks, pirate flags – could have been translated directly from the pages of Richmal Crompton’s Williams the Lawless, hinting at safe nursery havens lurking in the undisclosed backgrounds of some of these class warriors. Verso have performed a dubious service by packaging these petulant yelps like the latest punk revival pressing. They have granted an ...”

“... are lyrics everyone knows, but not ones Sondheim can hear without squirming. He went to Williams College in Massachusetts and acted a little: the part he craved was the young killer in Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall. He had to smoke for that role, and continued for decades. After graduating in 1950, he studied ...”

“... any partner to them. Quotations from Lawrence, Joyce, the pseudonymous Laurence St Clair, Alan Hollinghurst and others, and Nussbaum’s extended commentary on them, provide ample opportunity (not taken advantage of) to have index entries for ‘cocks, soaping of in showers’, ‘erection, elephantine’, ‘genital organs, the calling by proper ...”

“... more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of Travels over Feeling, to hang on to the timeline of Russell’s steep developmental itinerary. Some of this blurriness is characteristic of the man, but some is the ...”

“... with his old comrades Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin. ‘The Labour Party,’ he wrote with Alan O’Shea, ‘may be busy developing alternative policies, but there’s no sign that it is breaking with the neoliberal framing of debates … Rather, it is nervously responding to polls which frame their questions within this neoliberal agenda.’ And he ...”

“... went to work for a corporation that had benefited from their policies. The former health secretary Alan Milburn, for example, is on the payroll of several companies involved in private healthcare and is currently working for Cameron as the chair of his Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. It was not just the Iraq War that was responsible for the ...”

“... Miss S. spends much of her day sitting on the pavement in Parkway, where she has a pitch outside Williams and Glyn’s Bank. She sells tracts, entitled ‘True View: Mattering Things’, which she writes herself though this isn’t something she will admit. ‘I sell them but so far as the authorship is concerned, I’ll say they are anonymous and that’s ...”

“... though they were picked principally for their skill at chess. One of them, another Kingsman, was Alan Turing, who, with Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex, was foremost among those who decoded Ultra, encyphered on the Enigma machine, and, perhaps more than any single person, helped to save us from defeat in the battle of the Atlantic. When suddenly Japanese ...”

“... to a musician, and a flautist himself – at one time with the London Philharmonic. The composers Alan Rawsthorne, Christian Darnton, John Sykes were among his closest friends, and when he wrote with or for them, collaboration could be profound. At times, however, he almost churned out political campaign material which its organisers would then deal out to ...”

“... His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ‘dinosaur’ if they came from a Peter Taaffe or Alan Woods, but he is inoculated against such criticism by his youth and avoidance of jargon. In many respects, he is the best thing to happen to the non-compromised, non-New Labour left in the mainstream media in decades: he makes ideas that are customarily ...”

“... financial arrangement was part of the deal with 20th Century Fox negotiated by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over ...”