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“... will be his first ever exhibition in France, and for the Tate it’s the first since 1923. As Alan Crawford wrote in his ODNB entry, Beardsley has been ‘fragmented’ since his death, parcelled out between academics, curators, collectors of art and of books, and biographers. In its scale and range the Tate show goes some way towards putting him ...”

“... of his frank gaze – we have to wait for the family biography and for the definitive study by Alan Crawford. Meanwhile Fiona MacCarthy has written The Simple Life, an excellent introduction to C.R.A. and his most ambitious experiment. This was the Great Move of 1902, when he led his band of 150 craftsmen from the East End of London to an unknown ...”

“... indifferent private press books – would not by themselves have warranted a book on the scale of Alan Crawford’s admirable biography. It is Ashbee’s attempts to give practical expression to the idea that art matters that make Crawford’s apology for a book ‘more ponderous than its subject ...”

“... insert itself on the Euro-culture tourist trail. ‘Mackintosh Mania’, to borrow a phrase from Alan Crawford, deflects attention from Glasgow’s splendid Victorian architecture, and this has done real harm to the conservation of its historic environment. For if Mackintosh is a genius then what is ‘not Mackintosh’ – and what could be more ‘not ...”

“... cases a simplification, as Charles Harvey and Jon Press have made clear in the case of Morris and Alan Crawford in his work on Ashbee. It would be interesting to know how justified De Morgan was in feeling that now he could ‘make beautiful things ... nobody wants them’. His grief at the failure of the enterprise was dispelled when, with an ease that ...”

“... three-quarters in them,’ and once said that ‘Margaret has genius, I have only talent.’ As Alan Crawford concluded in his sane and succinct 1995 study: ‘Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald came together not only as man and woman, but also as artists. From this point on, the story of Mackintosh’s life, and of his work, cannot be told as if he ...”

“... Hugh MacDiarmid did not exist. And only Christopher Murray Grieve would have dared to invent him. Alan Bold’s valuable biography points out that when the 30-year-old Grieve began to write in the Scottish Chapbook under the pseudonym ‘M’Diarmid’, he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and ...”

“... take comfort from the fact that the selection of poems in Essential Reading (1986) is edited by Alan Jenkins of the TLS. And that book contains a few examples of what are (in part at least) knowing winks: after describing a catalogue of sufferings in C, Reading concludes that ‘this, rendered in catalectic tetrameters, might do for the TLS or other ...”

“... their ‘growing array of support from the entertainment world, including Terence Stamp, Michael Crawford, David Hemmings, Lance Percival, Tommy Steele and Marty Feldman’ – and that was just the defence. (Nowadays, of course, it’s Banks up-front, Major on the bench and Mellor for the early bath.) For a time, Richard Attenborough was club ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... good? Had the Queen been flesh and blood and not a cartoon she might well have been played by Joan Crawford, who was always something of an enigma to me. I never liked her, and with her gaunt face, protruding eyes and instinct for melodrama she seemed the embodiment of evil, yet she was often cast in the role of heroine. Even if she managed during the span of ...”

“... full of Keats; and not much that Aldington wrote is as moving as the plain diction of Ewart Alan Mackintosh in ‘In Memoriam, Private D. Sutherland, Killed in Action in the German Trench, May 16, 1916, and the Others who Died’. Aldington is at his best when less an observer of his own fears and emotions than a recorder (the Imagists were surely the ...”

“... exactly how – and very casual it sounds, and also very pre-modern: Sidney bought her a flat in Crawford Street, lots of furs, trips abroad and piano lessons. She left him from boredom. Again unlike Harriette, her heart wasn’t in becoming a professional, and she never did. Even her two-part affair with King Farouk (the second instalment encouraged by ...”

“... and ‘Old Possum’, but also cameo parts as his colleagues Richard de la Mare, Alan Pringle and Herbert Read. However, as the name ‘Herlock Sholmes’ indicates, he knew he was not always the master of disguise; nor, at times, was he as elusive as he sought to be. The other letter to Hayward in this volume that is signed not with a name ...”

“... Russell Harty on his deathbed had his tracheotomy tube removed, in order to be able to tell Alan Bennett that the princess had asked how he was, twice.Every celebrity seems to have fantasised about sex with the princess. Eddie Fisher claimed that he had had an affair with her. When her marriage was breaking up, Peter Sellers was besotted with the idea ...”