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“... it is, is not a book for children. In 1959, in the World’s Classics, it had an introduction by Alan Pryce-Jones, who saw the book as ‘the last novel of idyllic love which is likely to have universal appeal’. He considered that nothing in it came up to the opening scenes, which established the ‘magic ...”

“... he presumably means Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, rather than Alan Howarth, the Arts Minister and ex-Tory, but you can hardly blame Lord Bragg for his confusion: when Smith took over the post from Virginia Bottomley in May 1997, he was officially in charge of National Heritage, a department which had subsumed the Arts after ...”

“... brought up to show that the modernist impetus survived in the generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet ...”

“... page: ‘Top police “clear” Met chief over Menezes.’ In a long interview with the paper, Alan Given, the former second-in-command of Scotland Yard’s Central Operations unit, insisted that Blair didn’t realise the police had killed an innocent man until the following day – and no one else in the Met did, either. Given, who retired a few days ...”

“... trickery. Maybe it would work better on TV; but Richard Fleming could never compete with Alan Partridge. What is so good about Partridge is not only that Knowing Me, Knowing You spoofed its targets so brilliantly – after it, radio and TV can never sound the same again; not that broadcasting has taken any notice – but that its host was so ...”

“... and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity ...”

“... copy of Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? The Encyclopedia of Modern Life by Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur (Time Warner, £9.99). Some of the entries in Is It Just Me . . . ? that have also – or at any rate might well have – appeared on Spoons are: Tony Blair, chick-lit, city breaks, Sofia Coppola, Alain de Botton, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Tracey ...”

“... largely responsible for the party’s half-decent performance in the European elections in June. Alan Sked, the LSE lecturer who founded the party in 1993 and left it in despair in 1997, has described it in its current form as a bunch of ‘aged xenophobes’, ‘meaningless fuddy duddies with very little intelligence’. A freelance canvasser I encountered ...”

“... Alan Furst’s much-admired thrillers are set in Continental Europe during the Second World War and the years leading up to it. His heroes are more likely to be journalists, film producers or novelists than professional spies or rugged military types, though the protagonist of Dark Voyage (2004) is a fairly rugged merchant seaman ...”

“... her broomstick, and make the literary point that the Wharton Hall blague sounds rather like one of Alan Bennett’s fantasies. Michael Wharton is an admirer of Alan Bennett, as he made clear in the ‘Peter Simple’ column recently, while offering assistance to an Oxford phonetician on a visit to Leeds University to record ...”

“... It was surprising to see the resemblances between Her Victory and This Earth of Mankind. Alan Sillitoe’s new novel is about 50-year-old Britons feeling rootless. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is concerned with young people of the Dutch East Indies in the 1890s, almost choked with different roots – religions, races, cultures, classes – all sprouting wildly ...”

“... touches, ripples, curves and smiles’. There are soft touches like that to lighten the load of Alan Brien’s enormous, fact-studded novel about Lenin’s life, from 1886 to 1923. Lenin describes a German carnival scene in 1901, choosing his words carefully, as if he were a theatre reviewer. In 1917 he swims in a Finnish lake and is confronted by an ...”

“... takes a lively movement in making it with pen or pencil. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (1753) Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), is set during the summer of 1983. The narrator, William Beckwith, is a young aristocrat of leisure. He lives in Holland Park, swims at the Corinthian Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street ...”

“... is the million dollars.’ A million dollars is allegedly what Little, Brown in the States paid Alan Watt for his first novel, Diamond Dogs, out at the end of the month (Duckworth in the UK, £9.99). The story begins: ‘I was angry. We were all at Fred Billings’s house. He lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Carmen. His father raised ...”

“... in the tourist industry, but also an eccentric hotel resident who gives Travis a gold suit; Alan Price, whom we see, in footage intercut with the main narrative, playing songs in a studio as Anderson listens, turns up in a campervan with his band to give Travis a lift to London. So it comes as no surprise when Helen Mirren, who plays Patricia, the ...”