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“... the interpretations, so to reassure us about the mechanism and reliability of remembering, but, as Alison Winter’s deft study of 20th-century memory controversies concludes, we haven’t come close to a definitive answer. Yet, alongside our anxiety about the trustworthiness of remembering, there is an opposite pull, which is quite as powerful, towards ...”

“... modest invalid knew enough to know that she was living in an age of prescientific ferment. One of Alison Winter’s main points in Mesmerised is that, in an age when so much of what was being discovered seemed extraordinary, a belief in the widely attested mesmeric phenomena was no more fanciful than a belief in electricity. The history of mesmerism, or ...”

“... These three women writers were mythmakers. Alison Uttley created Little Grey Rabbit (1929-1973), Richmal Crompton thought of Just William and kept him going for 48 years, May Annette Beauchamp invented herself as Elizabeth. All three of them were, and had to be, resilient women, gallant survivors, Elizabeth in particular ...”

“... of film is? Are these other readers encountering looking-glass versions of themselves? At least Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs turns out not to be the more familiar kind of campus novel. Its heroine Vinnie Miner is going to London to do research, but she is not visiting some windswept new or crumbling old campus, and will not have to cope with superseded ...”

“... plaid blouses ... To be sure, academic gatherings are not noted for their elegance, but if, as Alison Lurie tells me, clothes are signifiers, or signs, or if, to put it another way, dressing is discourse, then there are several messages to be read here that would have spelled out disquieting news for Baudelaire. The first is that all degrees of seniority ...”

“... youth of Eighties Manhattan. The life in question is that of a rich-kid girl and would-be actress, Alison Poole, who tells her story in the first person. It has the contours of a moral tract. While ‘busting her ass’ at Lee Strasberg’s studio, Alison gets by on a handsome (but inadequate for the lifestyle) monthly ...”

“... pictorial music, in which its factual content has no active part. As Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith, the curators of Millais, the Tate’s endlessly surprising new show, point out in the catalogue, the painting is an early harbinger of the Aestheticism that would swing into vogue during the 1860s.* Not long afterwards, Millais was painting harmonic ...”

“... In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, Karen, a peasant girl, goes barefoot in summer and in winter wears wooden clogs that rub her feet raw, but the mirror tells her she’s lovely and she thinks that wearing the red shoes will make her feel like a princess. Like selfish Heidi and tomboy Katy, Karen is a mid-19th century girl crippled by egotism. The ...”

“... the dell of A Child’s Garden of Verses. Stevenson would dedicate that book to his nurse, Alison Cunningham, or Cummie, ‘the angel of my infant life’, whose ‘comfortable hand … led me through the uneven land’. To come from a family of lighthouse builders is perhaps to be recruited early to the cause of illumination and to fears of the ...”

“... uses for goose fat. In a cassoulet. In soups. On bread. On toast. ‘On your chest, rubbed in in winter. On leather boots, if they squeak. On your hands if they are chapped.’ Above all, it is a book about a particular sensibility – a unique and pungent one – that manifests itself most characteristically in the kitchen. That is what the genre is all ...”

“... between domestic servants and their masters and mistresses, especially mistresses, is the theme of Alison Light’s study of the home life of Virginia Woolf, whose complicated relationship with her own cook, Nellie Boxall, involved a degree of intimidation on both sides. The sight of Virginia and Leonard pacing the squares of Bloomsbury, well out of ...”

“... status was uppermost in Tincknell’s mind as he led me, together with his head of communications, Alison Dykes, through freshly landscaped grounds – hardwood decking, raised flowerbeds, gravel pathways – towards the sales suite, pointing out on the way a scale model of the power station about the size of the average family home. ‘Isn’t it ...”

“... century or so, but the 2013 calamity – part of a series of floods that wracked Britain that winter – was portrayed by the government and media as an outrider of man-made climate change. And yet the government response was broadly the same as in 1953: money was rushed into building new flood defences. The best – a cynic would say the only – way for ...”

“... and he was taken away.’ Jack’s body is always before his eyes, and the wet and dirt of that winter made him think what had become of that beautiful body as it lay rotting in the ground: ‘the thought makes me shudder.’ There are echoes in his limp grief. ‘Strong thunder and lightning ... Poor Boy! I trust that he sleeps ...”

“... met Issey Miyake. They exhibited together in Tokyo and in 1989 he used her buttons in his Autumn/Winter collection.After the war the restrictions lifted and Rie’s career resumed. She became a British citizen, and the Church Commissioners, the freeholders of her house in Albion Mews, granted permission for a pottery on site as long as she produced ‘high ...”