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“... Griffin has perhaps made a mistake in choosing so few letters that show the skittish and light-hearted side of their relationship: Russell was capable of writing affectionate nonsense, and is both a more engaging and more interesting figure when he does. The one man who emerges with his reputation entirely unscathed, however, is not a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... beginning with a man being shepherded through a darkened hall; glimpses of paintings, a shaft of light on a plaster ceiling, the gleam of armour but so dark (lines of light around the shutters) that it’s hard to see anyone’s face. A distant murmur of sound. Odd muttered directions. ‘Steady, a step here,’ the man ...”

“... been excavated. It’s a mistake. Walking through these tall narrow chambers, none with natural light and few with more than the faintest fresco, I feel it’s no more inspiring than a tour round a 19th-century municipal gasworks, which it undoubtedly resembles. Most of the party wear headphones and follow the cassette guide and so become dull and bovine in ...”

“... close to the wind in this passage, and indeed in Edward II as a whole. Even allowing, as Alan Bray scrupulously does in Homosexuality in Renaissance England, for an element of exaggeration and possible misrepresentation in the famous ‘Baines note’, in which the dramatist is reported as saying that Christ enjoyed carnal relations with John, the ...”

“... account of the Irish famine, and The Reason Why, about the events leading up to the Charge of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny birdlike skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus her sheet metal earrings). Irish, she had a Firbankian wit and a lovely turn of phrase, ‘Do you know the ...”

“... century has been to reconsider the bitter attacks on the Pharisees found in the Gospels, in the light the Jewish rabbinic writings. The portrayal of the Pharisees as hypocrites and persecutors, and of their religion as obsessionally ritualistic and legalistic, has played a great part in Christian anti-semitism throughout the ages. Shakespeare, for ...”

“... has it in for the French thinkers who have come among us since the late Sixties, bearing what Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont would like to see ostracised as fatuous, if not actually nonsensical ideas.The authors are both professors of physics, Sokal in New York, Bricmont in Belgium, and it’s as hard scientists that they make their complaint against the ...”

“... One was of the writer Francis Wyndham, then in his sixties, in conversation with a 34-year-old Alan Hollinghurst. It was an extraordinary portrait, the two absolutely at ease but sitting at an angle to each other and looking quizzical. Hollinghurst, clean-shaven and gentle. Wyndham, melancholy and long-cheeked. Intimate but formal. Possibly plotting. One ...”

“... object which must be treated with proper ritual care and in turn must be presented in a proper light to others’. Two men in a park: A: Do you have the time? B: Sorry. I haven’t got a watch. A: Never mind. B: (walking away, then stopping and calling back) But thank you for asking. Too late, B had become aware that he was being asked not so much for the ...”

“... However one day a car arrived at the house and the chauffeur knocked at the door with a box so light I thought it could only be an orchid. It turns out to be a white crash helmet with a note from Dennis Stevenson saying how his son (with no helmet) had been knocked off his bike and suffered epilepsy as a result, though happily not permanently. Since then ...”

“... finally to have come of age. The work of two generations of researchers, led by such avatars as Alan Everitt, Peter Laslett, J. H. Plumb, Lawrence Stone, Keith Thomas and E. P. Thompson, now constitutes a substantial body of knowledge that has transformed our conception both of British history and of what constitutes legitimate historical inquiry. The ...”

“... as Balfour once observed, it was a strange, anarchic, self-destructive phase. Much new light is shed on these mysteries by Alan Sykes’s fascinating new book, which covers the 1903-13 period. He traces again the now familiar story of Joseph Chamberlain’s crusade for tariff reform, which captivated the party ...”

“... the BBC. He probably spent his evenings at home with the telly. For the rest, their stories shed light on separate worlds. For instance, Charlton Heston dressed as Santa Claus was a feature of the Christmas parties Bergen went to as a child. Beryl’s heroes are a homely breed. She christened her cat Ronnie after Corbett. Everybody loves Beryl. Hers is not ...”

“... in a clapped-out language of description, a variety of flat American academic prose or, in Alan Rusbridger’s case, of tedious schoolboy prurience. This makes Rusbridger’s non-event of a book easily forgotten. In the case of William Eberhard and Bettyann Kevles, the sense of linguistic imprisonment is more important, raises much more interesting ...”