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“... could not be faulted. It just that ... well, Cyril Knowles doesn’t have white hair, and Alan Gilzean is not completely bald, and Cliff Jones (as I’ve been telling everyone for years) really is the quickest left-winger in the business. After about half an hour, my 16-year-old son (who was there to watch the ...”

“... words – after the murder. In The Blue Dahlia, the net closes in on the returning veteran, Alan Ladd, suspected of killing the wife who betrayed him while he was at war. The murderer in Chandler’s script was the William Bendix character, Ladd’s war buddy, an amnesiac killer suffering from blackouts: playing Smerdyakov to ...”

“... the prisoner testimonies, the Red Cross report, the three official investigations (Taguba, Fay/Jones and Schlesinger) that have separately reported on the events, along with the record of various defining exchanges in 2001-02 between lawyers in the White House, the US Department of State and the Department of Defense discussing the Geneva ...”

“... Of the short novel he published in 1932 she gets the very title wrong. And poor Henry Arthur Jones must have suffered enough from his name without being transposed into Arthur Henry. Shaw’s near-compulsion was not a fetish. He was capable of loving women who were neither singers nor actresses. Indeed, he married one of them – who, if Ms Peters has ...”

“... All about Eve, to any Western saloon, booze is the magnifier for all that 30-foot-tall emoting. As Alan Rudolph’s lugubrious 1995 biopic of Dorothy Parker, Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, illustrates, it was Prohibition that made boozing an essential act of transgression among the Hollywood crowd of the Twenties and Thirties, matching the literary hard ...”

“... early 1850s fired the imaginations of the Oxford undergraduates William Morris and Edward Burne Jones. But De Morgan was enrolled at University College, where there was no scope for picturesque medievalism. The spirit of place did not haunt Gower Street. Having failed to get a degree, De Morgan decided to become a painter. He made friends among the second ...”

“... states.The most original group of essays here – Asanga Welikala on conservatism; Emily Jones on liberalism; Stephen Sedley on socialism; James Mitchell and Alan Convery on unionism; and Michael Keating on nationalism – deal with the ways political ideologies interact with the constitution. Sedley points to ...”

“... New York. To the Brooklyn Museum to see ‘In the Light of Italy’, plein-air paintings by Thomas Jones, Valenciennes and the predecessors of Corot. It’s a vast building with wide corridors and huge airy galleries, though without much atmosphere and no sense that the building itself might be of interest; the museum just a series of plain rooms within its ...”

“... fought over dead emperor’s bloodstained sheets.Rasputin comes hot on the heels of Napoleon, Alan Turing chases Rasputin. So much loosely connected information clogs the mind rather than opening it up. There’s a passage in Alasdair Gray’s novel 1982, Janine where the word ‘poison’ begins to overwhelm the text: ‘Today the Prime Poisoner declared ...”

“... dismissive though faintly technical-sounding ‘pervert’ is pervasive. ‘PC Burton said he knew Jones as a convicted pervert,’ we read in an early newspaper report – the word trenchant but fastidious, declining to engage in the niceties of just what he was convicted of. The distaste it conveys is summed up by the awful Winterton when he says: ‘I ...”

“... a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is culturally ...”

“... Monty Python sketch about an obscure island completely inhabited by men sounding and looking like Alan Whicker. They paced to and fro, droning horribly and trailing microphones. It was, as Barnes pointed out, impossible for Whicker to have missed the item, or the point. Yet on his very next appearance there he was, pacing about and droning horribly and ...”

“... should be reviewed.’ The secret agents are an astonishing batch. Among them is Reginald Teague-Jones, who received two obituaries in the Times, the first under his later name of Ronald Sinclair. The reason for the change of name was that he was falsely accused of a war crime in Transcaspia in 1918 when a clutch of Leninist commissars were taken from ...”

“... This was the generation of Bowra, Betjeman, Harold Acton, John Sutro, Connolly, Powell and Alan Pryce-Jones. Waugh was the supreme master and his novels are fit to stand by The Importance of Being Earnest. His vision is so penetrating and fantastical that infidels, heretics and schismatics, as well as the ...”

“... with the ramifications of crisis, and a literary novel had to hedge its bets. The first chapter of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library contains a carefully managed piece of future-proofing: ‘My life was in a strange way that summer, the last summer of its kind there was ever to be. I was riding high on sex and self-esteem – it was my time, my ...”