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“... that the gift of celebrating place had not been altogether lost. By 1960 Green was confessing to Alan Ross that he found composition ‘so exhausting now I simply can’t do it any more’. He was not in good shape physically, was troubled by his increasing deafness, and the steady intake of gin can’t have helped. Even so, he continued to read a novel ...”

“... brutalities was to find ways of not brutalising thought and language. His poems, he insisted to Alan Ross, were ‘always factual’; but that’s not to imply that there is anything merely journalistic about them. The facts are marshalled not only to preserve the scene Spencer presents, but to investigate the larger contingencies of memory and ...”

“... well-read men of different generations. There is rather too much cricket for my own taste, but Alan Ross – perhaps the only writer on cricket I can assimilate – is extolled early on as ‘the first poet’ to report an MCC tour in Australia. Hart-Davis, professionally involved, has naturally a special point of view, and a wider tolerance (seasoned ...”

“... Stephen Spender (because of his experience de-Nazifying German libraries after the war) and Alan Ross. When I mention that Ross served in the Navy and, in poems like ‘Murmansk’, recalls the war in the Baltic, Stabnikov seems satisfied. We pass the now famous queue outside McDonald’s, where, I am ...”

“... Guide to America’s New War (NYU, $16.95), a collection of essays edited by John Collins and Ross Glover about the uses to which language has been put by the Bush Administration since 11 September 2001. Each chapter considers a different word – e.g. anthrax, cowardice, freedom, jihad – but the overall argument is against propaganda and ...”

“... explorers, famous in their day, but now known only to Arctic buffs, such as John and James Clark Ross, Rae, Pullen, Collinson, M’Clure, Austin, Ommanney, Richardson, Penny, DeHaven, Kane, Forsyth, Bellot, Kennedy, Belcher, Inglefield, M’Clintock – and names of ships, such as ...”

“... Chatterley for a reference for a gamekeeper. The magazine sort of launched me on a career, because Alan Pryce-Jones, who was then the editor of the TLS, gave me a lot of reviewing work. AH: How did you see your future then? FW: I suppose I feebly wanted to be a writer, but, apart from those stories, I couldn’t think what on earth I was going to do. I got my ...”

“... Luce’s taste for ‘relentless “departmental” organisation’, according to his biographer Alan Brinkley. Time was first to be called Facts, and its research department ‘was the only non-clerical area of the magazine to hire women … and for many years it hired only women.’ An editor wrote the young ladies a cheering memo: Checking is ...”

“... Day but a culture which represents much of the reality of British life itself. Every time (say) Alan Hansen makes a general comment on the nature of British football he is in part making a general comment on Britain – a fact of which he is probably aware. Yet in one important respect it is still not universal. Although the huge numbers of people who play ...”

“... Nose (1996) – both edited by Alec Finlay – and Collected Poems and Songs, edited by Raymond Ross. All three books reveal Henderson, by then in his seventies and eighties, as he chose to be revealed. His only other publications had been fifty years earlier: Ballads of World War Two, collected and sometimes also written by himself, in 1947, and Elegies ...”

“... mode of ‘election’ the chances of its becoming a genuinely elected body are even more remote. Alan Johnson replaces the pliable Ruth Kelly probably because, as a ‘traditional’ trade unionist, he might at least appear more sympathetic to comprehensive schools than she did. The appointment of the ineffable Hazel Blears, someone particularly associated ...”

“... for them, but not, as it is showing every sign of doing, on account of their lack of severity. Alan Johnson, ex-home secretary, in an otherwise sensible interview in the Independent on Sunday, says that he didn’t like it when Ed Miliband said ID cards were a mistake, but admits that this particular policy is the leader’s ‘“civil ...”

“... he was a trained chemist as well as a lawyer – also at a premium in the 1940s. Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, no particular friend of the Left, and deeply averse to party politicians, wrote of Cripps in July 1944: ‘I like him more each time I meet him.’ Brooke could have written this comment for several reasons ...”

“... the description – with my substitution of ‘boy’ where Mailer had ‘prisoner’ – fits Alan Reeve exactly. Notes from a Waiting-Room is a confused, anguished account of Reeve’s relatively short, troubled life up till the time two years ago when he shot and killed a Dutch policeman while on the run from Broadmoor. The unusual conditions of the ...”

“... him paying tribute to Billy Wright on an ITV programme, evoking (as, according to Richard Holt and Alan Tomlinson in their essay, he often does) the lost world of a handful of heroes – Wright himself, Nat Lofthouse, Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews – it was impossible, even allowing for a certain artifice on Mr Major’s part, not to reflect on the tension ...”