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“... bear is turned into a totem of masculinity – masculinity as imagined by a boy – and called Alan Measles. Since 2003 Perry has established himself as an accomplished and adventurous broadcaster on such subjects as class and gender. His new book, The Descent of Man, isn’t designed to accompany the Channel Four series All Man, but reuses some of the ...”

“... has happened as a coup by the Tories and the media. Re the succession, names in the frame include Alan Beith, Vince Cable, Frank Field, Alan Haselhurst, Ann Widdecombe, George Young and, most remarkable of all, John Bercow, who many on our side favour as a way of getting back at the Tories. I should also report that one ...”

“... It was Bridget Jones’s Diary, published in 1996, that marked the arrival of ‘chick lit’; the phrase appeared in the OED late last year. If the dictionary definition brushes the genre aside – ‘(chiefly derog.) literature which is perceived or marketed as appealing to young women’ – it is not the fault of Helen Fielding’s comedy of manners ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst​ ’s tally as a published novelist is six books over 29 years, so that’s more than two thousand pages of astonishing responsiveness to light, sound, painting, the past, social nuance, music, sensation both sexual and otherwise, buildings inside and out, the inner life of sentences – this is only the beginning of a list ...”

“... Everyone​  knows that Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC asked an Old Bailey jury in 1960 whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a book they would want their wives or servants to read. The jury – which included three women – is said to have laughed. Its acquittal of Penguin on a charge of violating the newly minted Obscene Publications Act 1959 is widely regarded as a turning point in the centuries-long persecution of literature and philosophy in the name of morality ...”

“... Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, Bruce Forsyth are vignetted time and again. The theatre critic Alan Brien makes more appearances than Kenneth Tynan, but is worth his place. He once accompanied Mr and Mrs Macmillan on a visit to Tyneside, to the North Sands shipyard. The ‘bronchial blast’ of a hooter sounded, startling Macmillan. ‘Lady Dorothy was ...”

“... before Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World was installed (until 25 October). Jonathan Jones already felt certain in January that the show ‘wants to free’ Hepworth ‘from any provincial status’, so as to place her works ‘alongside those of Brancusi, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Pollock, Rothko or Richard Serra’. What else to expect from curators ...”

“... in their philosophical outlook. An instance of the first fallacy is provided by Chapter Three of Alan Gilbert’s book, titled ‘Chartism and Marx’s Second Revolutionary Strategy’, yet almost exclusively concerned with Engels. The history of the second fallacy is traced by Jacoby, with particular emphasis on the little-known Italian opposition to Engels ...”

“... new book, we find tributes to that earlier novel: ‘A cross between Wodehouse and Isherwood’ (Alan Brien), ‘The most glitteringly funny prose since Evelyn Waugh’ (Kenneth Tynan). The English Way of Doing Things does not live up to these tributes. The farcical plot evidently attempts a dirtied-up Wodehouse style, of the kind successfully carried off by ...”

“... of Virgil, Horace and Cicero. Allan Massie is a Scotsman, applauded for his Scottishness by Alan Bold and Douglas Dunn, and he has adopted one of Scott’s devices for excusing the excesses of his imagination. Sir Walter would insert into his historical romances the pedantic objections of some imaginary fool, called Dryasdust or Cleishbottom: after ...”

“... o hyd.                                            Alan Llwyd This englyn, as so often, is dependent on particular Welsh assonances, but in at least some cases, and certainly in Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Mabinogi, the achievements are accessible in translation. Consider only this brief extract from the technique ...”

“... telephone conversation with Mr Parkinson and after. The first-edition story, bylined Michael Jones, Political Editor, had extensive and detailed contradictions of Miss Keays’s version of events by the travelling troupe of Mr Parkinson’s friends, plus the odd insult, and the statement that Mr Parkinson had kept to his side of the agreement not to ...”

“... notable heterosexual relationships. According to Hastings, Maugham fell genuinely in love with Sue Jones, a warm, easygoing actress on whom he based the character of Rosie in Cakes and Ale. They had an on-off eight-year affair, and he eventually proposed to her. Rosie is portrayed as flirty, carnal, not especially bright and more than a little vulgar. ‘She ...”

“... It’s not easy to put aside our knowledge and inhabit their innocence. In The Stranger’s Child Alan Hollinghurst went to some trouble to shake the patronising certainty of retrospect, setting the first part of his novel before the First World War, the second part in the 1920s. Readers had to piece together what had happened in the interval, a lesser ...”

“... Rotten or Sid Vicious, eclipsing the group’s musical muscle: drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock. (It was Matlock who wrote nearly all the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad ...”