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“... extraordinary range of reading. In what she describes as ‘a biographical note on the text’, Alison Light, Samuel’s widow and one of not many contemporary scholars who can write as gracefully and entertainingly as he did, tells us among other things about his elaborate methods of annotation, the cutting and pasting, the shifting of papers from one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a culture first hand while actually shaping it into a form, a generality’ (in the words of Alison Light, quoted in the book). To avoid a charge of shaping and labelling, he offers ‘radical’ as an anti-term: ‘not’ the jazz age, ‘not’ the metropolis, ‘not’ the Wall Street Crash, ‘not’ the Bright Young Thing, ‘not’ the ...”

“... tread Pavement as bare, as smooth as palms. Her dark eyes close. Where traffic ebbs She leaves her light weight in my ...”

“... central to any account of the period, only steps out from the wings to introduce an Oxford Book of Light Verse that is a ‘brilliant correction’ of his own poetry’s ‘wayward obscurity’, and to serve as an unlikely ally to the avowedly nostalgic John Betjeman. Likewise, we get no more than a brief sidelong glimpse of George Orwell. So be it. Let’s ...”

“... meaning is clear but coyly hidden, as in many modern fictions; although the examples sought out by Alison Lurie have as much cunning and high spirits in them as the old tales. In Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Tale’ (1982) it takes us a few pages to spot that the wife is a wolf, her husband a mere man. But the meaning is always there, urging us to spot ...”

“... the polished treads of the staircase’ and ‘lay in drifts’ on the floor of Samuel’s study, Alison Light wrote in A Radical Romance (2019), her memoir of their marriage. Samuel was one of the most influential historians of his generation, a prodigious teacher, researcher and writer. Hosts of historians, trade unionists and Italian Marxists were ...”

“... A restricted setting, such as a big house, intensifies these conflicting pressures. (Alison Light has said that Christie’s novels can be read as ‘one huge advertisement of the murderousness of English social life and of the desperate need to convert to pleasure all those anxieties which an existence like that of the postwar middle ...”

“... bugs that eat the flesh.’ There is an unnerving supernatural dimension to this sinister setting. Alison Harte, an overweight, middle-aged medium, works the dormitory towns of the M25, accompanied by her prim assistant, Colette, and her spirit guide, Morris, whom Alison describes to her audience as a former circus ...”

“... The Power and the Glory, but largely consist of forgotten country-house comedies, French classics, light farces, anodyne musical comedies and the work of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan (though, unlike today, there were no musical revivals, popstar tributes or shows based on films). In an era when the point of plays was to provide vehicles for star actors to ...”

“... pylons by the main dam in the rainforest, briefly depriving whole sections of the city of light and pumped water. His daughter Sophie, in a camouflage jump suit, went around paying off his impromptu militia. A change from last year, when she threw a party in a nightclub and wound up dancing on a table to celebrate the fact that her personal bank ...”

“... to distinguish these mechanisms is thin, but a proper understanding of such behaviours might shed light on the tangled issue of human behavioural motivation. Aside from the practical difficulties of studying the epidemiology of disease and healing in wild animal populations, there is the problem of what constitutes medication. The line dividing medicine from ...”

“... Party membership and the circulation of its newspaper, the Daily Worker, expanding rapidly, that Alison Macleod joined the Party. She was a member from 1939, and from 1944 to 1957 belonged to the Worker’s staff. She left both as a result of the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956-57. In recent years Macleod has been rereading her diary notes and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... you know is wrong.’ The mind screw is one of the default tropes of cultural studies. Alison Kinney’s Hood is a minor classic of the genre, replete with every trope and device one might hope for. The book is part of a series entitled Object Lessons, which looks at ‘the hidden lives of ordinary things’ and which are all utterly ‘Fridge ...”