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“... time: correspondances, corridors, traipsing. Took us about half an hour to reach nearby Bastille. Light lunch in first brasserie beyond the exit, place de la Bastille. Taxi to Carnavalet – couldn’t remember name of street (de Sévigné), neither could taxi-man, who took us on a tour of the entire Marais before finally dropping us apologetically at ...”

“... and Archbishop McQuaid’s poison pen, but makes a considerable satirical success of the scene. ‘Alan C. Breeze had returned from England with a set of false teeth, which he claimed to have belonged to T.S. Eliot.’ The better to bite her with, no doubt. A married woman, she then went off to London, which owned a little Dublin of its own as far as hard ...”

“... which must be counted his ‘Newdigate Poem’ in praise of ‘The Benefits of the Electric Light’: ‘A smell of burning fills the startled air –/The Electrician is no longer there’). In later years he told Maurice Baring: ‘Verse is the only form of activity outside religion which I feel to be of real importance; certainly it is the only form ...”

“... Rehearsing his part in a production of The Birthday Party at Scarborough, the young Alan Ayckbourn asked Harold Pinter for a little more information about the fictional character. Pinter said: ‘Mind your own fucking business. Concentrate on what’s there.’ It’s a good answer, and Ayckbourn no doubt took it kindly and got the point ...”

“... it became a problem. Gallipoli has become one of those military cock-ups – the Charge of the Light Brigade is another – that the British seem almost to revel in, even to gain strength from. As Peter Cook said in Beyond the Fringe, ‘we need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.’ The general verdict today is that it ...”

“... fall into three main groups: the poet-critics (Blake Morrison, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Alan Jenkins, Clive Wilmer), the academics (Nicholas Jenkins, Terry Castle, Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Deborah Bowman, William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists (Karl Miller, Anthony Thwaite, Robert ...”

“... animated film (the essay’s ostensible topic), but as the source of an irresistible urge to set light to stuff. Incendiarism galvanises mob violence in Strike; as it would also have done on two separate occasions in the Gold Rush movie Eisenstein never quite got to make for Paramount while he was in Hollywood. The mesmeric influence or ‘attraction’ of ...”

“... Zulus say of tyrants. They had their own language, their own customs and traditions, and a myth to light their way, a mystic Christian mission on the Dark Continent. They spoke of themselves as the bearers of the light, but in truth they were dark of heart, and they knew it, and willed it so.’ It is Rian Malan’s ...”

“... Willyism. Everyone says Wicks is useless. This seems the only satisfactory way to write about the Alan Clark Diaries: set out hunks and small slivers like a buffet for the prospective readership to nibble and savour. The book has been ineptly ill-reviewed so far: furtive pieties on the infidelity front, squeaks from the girls on the Via Femina and bursts of ...”

“... rates (and the return on other assets) about which day-to-day fluctuations take place.’ Thus Alan Coddington, in the course of arguing that Keynes was simply in a muddle when he maintained that interest was explained by liquidity preference: whereas he should have seen its role as balancing the inducements to invest (‘productivity’) with the ...”

“... creativity and explains the secrets of his appeal in a way unmatched by any other critic’. Alan Bliss’s purpose is more modest. Twenty years ago he had the idea of publishing a paper on the Anglo-Saxon story of Finn and Hengest. Discovering that nearly all his conclusions had been anticipated in lectures by Tolkien (the diffident words are ...”

“... of the ‘Savoy Mafia’, a group of arms manufacturers and dealers who met in the Savoy suite of Alan Curtis, a close friend of Denis Thatcher, to discuss their contracts and the chances for more of them. He had met everyone he needed to know. He had met Denis Thatcher and Mark at an arms fair. He had several times come across Stephen Tipping, Mark’s ...”

“... this. The Conclusion tells us of an initial hope that the family reconstitution method would throw light on the interplay of demographic, economic and social forces in specific communities: was Hodge down in Devon marrying earlier than his dad because his prospects were brightening, because customary village constraints were weakening, or because he didn’t ...”

“... models and furniture around on his miniature platform to get the perspective right and see how the light struck the arrangement. The figures in the replica box have been set up – in tribute – to mimic the composition of Poussin’s Extreme Unction, one of his Seven Sacraments series, which the Fitzwilliam recently acquired at a cost of several million ...”

“... bits and pieces, but earning very little. And then my marriage drifted away too, leaving me, in Alan Partridge’s phrase, clinically fed-up boo-hoo. My wife, having said she would leave, took two and a half years to find a way of doing it – there is a small consolation in not being the only procrastinator in the relationship. While this was going on the ...”