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“... England and Ireland. The books can be said to stand at opposite ends of a spectrum of emotion. Alan Bell’s is cool, elegant, efficient, eminently printable, while the other smacks of excitement, adrenalin, and of an oral tradition. Smith is present in the Burke book, as an ideological partner of the Whig advocates who were briefed in the legal ...”

“... A cynic? How can I not be when I have spent my life writing history?’ Alan Taylor’s love letters to his Hungarian third wife created a predictably prurient, though transient, stir when they were published earlier this year. Their more lasting interest may lie in the light that they throw upon Taylor the practising historian, musing to a fellow historian about the mysteries of his craft ...”

“... take comfort from the fact that the selection of poems in Essential Reading (1986) is edited by Alan Jenkins of the TLS. And that book contains a few examples of what are (in part at least) knowing winks: after describing a catalogue of sufferings in C, Reading concludes that ‘this, rendered in catalectic tetrameters, might do for the TLS or other ...”

“... mixed arising from the every sight of that capital H for Him. What sort of novel do you suppose Alan Warner imagined himself first writing? A young boy’s life among the mountains he loved and which constrained him? A piece of social realism, about how hard life is for the isolated, economically marginal clumps of working-class people scattered here and ...”

“... other words, it was both an exercise in self-ridicule and a warning.’ Everything Milosz says is light and clear; it certainly isn’t weak, but it is unemphatic, unemotional, scrupulous, fastidious, reticent. Milosz returns to this contrast on a number of occasions. ‘Nothing is more deceptive than the apparent similarity between the Polish and Russian ...”

“... or pseudo-philosophical argument, the less the dogmatic geminate intuition and the alienating light of a non-twin’s reaction can register at a human level. Unlike Johnson’s italics, Tournier’s are not finally ironic, although there are properties which link Gemini with the tradition of Rasselas, Shandeian encyclopedic fantasies such as Jean’s ...”

“... of acting as agents of the Soviet Union (a charge that appears particularly preposterous in the light of the savage criticisms of Thompson and the movement that have come from the Soviet press). It is difficult to take such accusations seriously. Yet there is one sense in which the peace movement could succeed, as its critics maintain, in making the world ...”

“... was famous for making a melon move at the far end of a dining table – though only in dim light. Even at his most benign, Schultz can’t help wondering what Sidgwick imagined to be the spiritual significance of a twitching melon. But Schultz knows the answer. What Sidgwick wanted was some assurance that the universe was ‘friendly’. ‘Is the ...”

“... Many tributes have been paid to Alan Taylor, including some by old and close friends who knew him very much better than I did. My excuse for adding one more piece is that I would like to explain something of what he meant to younger historians who came within his orbit. Perhaps I shall end up speaking only for myself, but at any rate I can speak from experience as one of his pupils ...”

“... from Poems Partly of Rural Life in National English (1846). It is good enough to make us question Alan Chedzoy’s confident assertion, on the excellent tape from Canto Publications, that Barnes’s dialect poems are plainly superior to his poems in Standard English, much as Burns in Scots is, we may well think, better and more authentic than Burns in ...”

“... Roosevelt called ‘no ordinary time’? Can we justify the pleasure we take in these books by the light they shed on public matters? Secret Affairs, the most sordid tale, may seem to have the greatest policy significance. But although the trouble between Welles and Hull sucks in many other foreign policy characters (like William Bullitt, with whom Roosevelt ...”

“... The second part of Alan Walker’s projected three-volume life of Liszt opens with events any biographer would relish. At the height of an immensely successful, indeed unprecedented career as an international virtuoso of the piano, Liszt, aged 35 and (as he felt) nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, decided on a complete change ...”

“... on a tram going down Wellington Road and passing the gasworks, when she lays a hand on my arm. ‘Alan. That is the biggest gasworks in England. And I know the manager.’ A different order of aunt is Aunt Eveline Peel, my grandmother’s sister-in-law. Aunt Eveline is never Aunty Eveline. I suppose because she is older and too substantial for that. A ...”

“... old photograph, are much less capable, and can be merely sentimental. Duncan Forbes also has some light and comical poems, ‘Fatso and Spotty’ and ‘Politics of Envy’ (about the ‘Jackdaw folder of “Historical Genitalia” ’) particularly so. His serious vein is concise, and if not macabre then bleak and heavy with mortality. He uses interesting ...”

“... or the disreputable. I envisaged a series of events I took to be wildly implausible, but in the light of recent developments they turn out to be almost tame. I read for instance that the video guide to the National Trust house at Hughenden, once lived in by Disraeli, is voiced by Jeffrey Archer, euphemistically described by the Trust as a ‘provocative ...”