“... There is not much left that cannot be done on two wheels. On the last page of this opulent book is a photograph of the Young Theatre of Riga performing Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich on bicycles. We are not told what the critics said about this event. Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of messenger boys delivering pizzas on unicycles? The author, Pryor Dodge, withholds his own opinion ...”

“... the ownerless, de-authored, copyrightless text? Barthes gives an oblique answer on the back page of S/Z’s French edition, where it is noted that medieval writing was quadripartite. There was the scriptor who copied, the compilator who interpolated commonplaces, the commentator who wove in interpretation and the auctor who ventured some new ideas. If ...”

“... be trivial but not difficult enough to cause a nervous breakdown.’ For this and other methods, Alan Turing developed a highly original form of statistical theory which made it easy to calculate the relative weight of evidence supporting various hypotheses. The most fruitful tool for code-breaking was a ‘crib’: a piece of clear text believed to ...”

“... imaginative device, and ought to work well. For the commentating Che Guevara of the stage musical Alan Parker has substituted a ubiquitous, many-roled Argentinian ‘bloke’ (the colloquial che is not really translatable because it is used where the parallel words are not used in other languages, but it means something like ‘pal’, or ‘mate’, or ...”

“... attention to detail that soap opera is famous for. Meanwhile Elaine Dundy’s Elvis and Gladys and Alan Bleasdale’s Are you lonesome tonight? – which has arrived in the West End from Liverpool – concentrate respectively on the early and final chapters of the life. Both are sober and reflective, anxious to celebrate rather than to sneer. Jerry Hopkins’s ...”

“... Sheila Rowbotham’s Promise of a Dream: A Memoir of the 1960s (see Jenny Diski’s piece on page 9 of this issue) is to be reviewed in the Financial Times by Tariq Ali. It has been noticed at the LRB that in her lengthy acknowledgments, Tariq Ali is singled out for thanks twice. Rowbotham also thanks Robin Blackburn, who, we understand, is to review ...”

“... for amusement has always been there, a crucial element in a career of giving life to arguments. Alan Bennett, a friend of hers since Oxford, gives an account of a posh dinner she once attended with her then fiancé, Tim Binyon. A flunkey at the door asked for their names so that he could announce them. ‘Paralysed with shyness,’ Bennett writes, Mary-Kay ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... heart of it is the contrast between Ovid’s and Ransmayr’s metamorphoses, pointed up by a 25-page ‘Ovidian Repertory’ of comparisons which makes clear Ransmayr’s Teutonic grotesquerie and love of the horrific. Ovid’s Tereus was King of Thrace, Ransmayr’s Tereus is the town’s butcher who smashes the skulls of bulls with his axe and roasts the ...”

“... at a glance about its gatherings, quadrants, paper-types, rastrologies (numbers of staves per page) and stich-holes. From diagrams in the chapters on reconstruction techniques, we can learn how sheets were folded, and even how to make sketchbooks of our own: shades here of Blue Peter. One such chapter introduces pleasant distinctions between ...”

“... ears onto any of God’s creatures. That a mainstream newspaper could carry a serious science page once a week is perceived as a lunatic notion which would deprive it of its readership along with its profits. Science has to be rediscovered by our publishers, some of whom once had a long tradition in popularising the various disciplines in special ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is, for example, his anxious habit of indicating his theme in his opening sentences. Turning to page one of Talking It Over and reading that ‘My name is Stuart, and I remember everything,’ one can be pretty sure that Stuart’s problem is going to be that he can’t forget (and sure enough, 250 pages later, Stuart’s ex-wife is forced to perform an ...”

“... Ireland hangs in the balance at Drumcree the Observer gives it one small paragraph on the front page, the rest all to do with the lobbying scandal the Observer is so proud of having unearthed. It’s only after nine whole pages to do with the paper’s ‘exclusive’ that it manages to get its head out of its own arse to start talking about Northern ...”

“... a combination of left-wing ideas and journalistic flair often earned Burchett space on the front page when newspapers in London were reduced to four pages through shortage of newsprint. While ‘island-hopping’ in the Pacific, and ‘shuffling along in the chow line for lunch’ on board a ship, he heard about ‘the big new bomb we just dropped on the ...”