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“... 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 ...”

“... he condemns him for not doing the same again. He would have found there that, apart from Fourth Light Armoured Brigade, which took the vital Martuba airfields on 15 November (and thus saved Malta from starvation), Eighth Army could only support one division beyond Tobruk. This was Harding’s Seventh Armoured – of whose 47 medium tanks not even five were ...”

“... strengths, and some of the characteristic failings, of a great deal of current French history. Alan Sheridan’s excellent translation of Alain Corbin’s Filles de Noce makes widely available what is probably still the best, the most formidably-researched and the most wide-ranging study of 19th-century prostitution. The fourth volume of A History of ...”

“... you will be delighted to know that a pub in the Yorkshire town of Otley is to be renamed the Alan Bennett in your honour in order to celebrate Yorkshire Day.’ Fortunately this bizarre baptism is only for a month; were it longer I fear it would soon be reflected in the takings. The body responsible for this kindly gesture is the Otley Pub Club, which ...”

“... their protruding little kitchen wings. It is the most compact imaginable for a street house. The light in the rooms facing the yard is but spare, but the whole house is comparatively low. Also, as regards the front, the buildings from the end of the 19th century differ from those of the beginning. In order to use the narrow site each of these small houses ...”

“... cause with a slightly older cohort, Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill, Gaudier-Brzeska, Elsie Henderson, Alan Durst. In works produced both before and after World War One, they began to remake the look and feel of the carving tradition. Dark hardwood and mottled native (i.e. English) stone were more often used than crystalline marble. The female torso stood for the ...”

“... It is appropriate, for his artist wife, that several of these poems should celebrate the light (and odd that one of the finest, ‘Writing with Light’, should not have been included): not only all the variations of sunlight, but also the ‘lovely, erotic flame of the candlelight’, and the ‘leaf-...”

“... and conflicting objectives that Bacon composed the works contained in the collection edited by Alan Stewart with Harriet Knight. The Oxford Francis Bacon is a major scholarly project conceived by the late Graham Rees and administered nowadays by an editorial advisory board of 16 experts under the direction of Brian Vickers, the leading Baconian ...”

“... was/flaming like a nerve and the walls were like paper/and my eyes could not close.’ Land to Light On (1997) conveys the disorientation of finding herself no longer in Grenada but in rural Canada, ‘framed and frozen on a shivered/country road instead of where I thought/I’d be in the blood/red flame of a revolution’. The north is colourless ...”

“... her first collection of stories, Encounters, in 1923, when she was 24; that year she also married Alan Cameron, who worked first in education and then in schools’ broadcasting for the BBC. The marriage worked – Bowen liked making a home, and entertaining – and lasted as a fond childless companionship (though she had passionate love affairs) until ...”

“... brought out the complexity of nature, exploration and empire brought unimagined species to light. There were economic and social causes. ‘The triumph of the new attitude was closely linked to the growth of towns and the emergence of an industrial order in which animals became increasingly marginal to the process of production. This industrial order ...”

“... brings to those of his other characters. But can his failure perhaps be seen in a more positive light? Sturgis is in general something of a non-deliverer, and makes a point out of the aborted climax and missed occasion. The protracted set-piece of Sainty’s coming-of-age celebrations is mainly a matter of anticipation and dread. The big scenes can’t ...”

“... redeemed by a vision on the eastern horizon of the towers of Lincoln Cathedral, caught in the late light of the setting sun. It’s the kind of thing that would have immensely excited me as a boy (and quite excites me now). I’ve driven up and down this road hundreds of times and never seen it before, but that’s because in a coach you’re hoisted above the ...”

“... And yet, as the doctor and everybody else kept saying, depression was not madness. It would lift. Light would return. But when? The young sympathetic doctor from the local practice could not say. The senior partner, whom we had first consulted, was a distinguished looking figure, silver-haired, loud-talking, a Rotarian and pillar of the ...”

“... a painter whom she fell for over a bottle of vodka when he was brown in white trousers. With Alan Sharp, a novelist and playwright: Alan arrives at 6.30. A hearty discussion on Anglo-Saxon dictionerys. At eight a meal. Bed. Then chat on the novel in English life. Then Salvation Army lore, then a whole two hours of ...”