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“... Hughes-Hallett adopts the early modern manual format, moving through the eight stages of the hunt. Other chapters use the diary form, particularly when things get stormy – and interesting – in the House of Commons. I sometimes yearned for a longer sentence and a steadier authorial hand, for more evaluation of motivations and consequences. And I would ...”

“... were contested; a time of ferment and danger, and of colourful, albeit often grimy, characters.Alice Hunt’s Republic follows Paul Lay’s entertaining history of Cromwell’s rule, Providence Lost, published in 2020, and Anna Keay’s acclaimed The Restless Republic (2022). It is therefore less of a stand-out than it would have been five years ...”

“... geese fly out from beneath her pallium; her golden hair is a field of wheat. Around her feet a hunt is taking place – Uccello’s Hunt in the Forest but with a sylph instead of a stag – while the sea behind is teeming with boats, whales, crabs and bizarre creatures like monsters on a medieval map. From 1950 the ...”

“... love of a ‘heaven-born’ Etonian!Smoke from cheroots, fêtes on lawns,dances by moonlight at Alice in Wonderland –no the viceroy – the viceroy’s ball!Lock, stock and bobbing along onpalanquins to gothic verandahs where dawnHimalayas through Poobong-mist,the 12-bore or swagger stick topi-and-khakibobbery shikar, Tally ho! for the boarsin a dead-leaf ...”

“... question was addressed was in little danger of becoming meaningless. ‘I’m very glad you like Alice,’ Charles Dodgson wrote to Margery Worthington in 1895, ‘but what wicked wicked sisters you have not to let you read it till they go to school! But perhaps the mistress had told them they had to learn a page of it by heart as a lesson?’ Dodgson is ...”

“... from the curriculum in favour of minority authors; for every student in his department who reads Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, 83 read Shakespeare. He also defends the current trends toward professionalisation and politicisation. Professionalisation has gone hand in hand with the opening up of American universities, and since the early 20th century (not ...”

“... respects, the novel is a disappointing performance. Jonathan Cape would apparently have us take Alice fell as a condition-of-England novel. Yet this national portentousness is refracted at the reader by fictional techniques which are distractingly mal à propos. Superficially, Alice fell is, in fact, scarcely a novel at ...”

“... Just west​ of Alice Springs is a turn-off marked ‘Flynn’s Grave’. It leads to a blunt stone plinth with a round boulder on top and a plaque commemorating John Flynn (1880-1951), a Presbyterian minister who was sent by his church to the Northern Territory in 1912 to investigate conditions in the bush. His report was grim, describing poor communications and scant healthcare ...”

“... is not correct. That is not correct,’ he told the insect, like a pedantic character in Alice in Wonderland. ‘The schedule was not a claims schedule, it was a letter.’ It was disconcerting to see Britain turn into a one-newspaper nation. All the broadsheets waited on the Telegraph, whose early edition supplied them with their front-page ...”

“... and write books, it must have seemed like a good idea to pass them off as a by-product of the hunt, like a yarn overheard in the boot room.The thirty-year gap between her early novels and Good Behaviour (there was an unsuccessful play in 1961, which gave her years of writer’s block) meant that she had no readerly expectations to live up to. Most readers ...”

“... book, all the more powerful for the equanimity with which it is expressed. Grandma and Aunt Alice used to take all us kids, who were too young to walk the long distance to school, to hunt miles around for places where prospectors had camped. The prospectors lived on tinned foods. When the tins were emptied they were ...”

“... be fatal. With appropriate programming such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked.Quite a vision, at a time when most computers still depended for input and output on punched paper tape. Three years later, in 1968, Sutherland built a machine at MIT he called the Sword of Damocles: a big stereoscopic display – so heavy that it ...”

“... as the Nazis marched into Colmar. The early part of the book is dominated by Ungerer’s mother, Alice (his father died when Tomi was three), a willowy, good-looking woman possessed of what the Alsatians call gratl, a sense of her own worth. Protestant and bourgeois, she nevertheless observed the Catholic saint-days. A consummate actor, she used her ...”

“... light’. Although the Great War forces its way into Secret Destinations, overshadowing even ‘Alice Springs’, the poem to engage most overtly with war is one called ‘1940’. It reveals the difficulty of writing about the Second World War. By virtue of both its title and its subject, a mass of men waiting to go to war, it invites comparison with ...”

“... of a small sect who call themselves ‘ethical’ or ‘vegetarian’ vampires, having elected to hunt wild animals instead of feeding off human blood. Edward loves Bella too; but he can barely let himself even kiss her, for fear of ‘losing control’, squashing her to death in his super-powered passion – ‘I could reach out, meaning to touch your ...”