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“... conversion, or at least no account as unequivocal as that of his near contemporary, George Gilbert Scott, the most prolific of the English Goths. Reading Pugin, Scott recounted in his memoirs, persuaded him that Gothic was the only style for a Christian country, leaving him to denounce both trabeation and impure Gothic styles. Rather than suggest the ...”

“... A study of his aesthetic preferences was expanding into a biography when I last heard, while Alan Bell, whose work on Sydney Smith is drawing to a close, plans to move up the street in Combe Florey and produce ‘a biographical study’. Though a West Country recluse can hardly be the centre of a literary movement, the comparison with Virginia Woolf and ...”

“... was written without the use of the letter e (it was translated into e-less English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1994).1 W, ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) finds in the letter of its title both a cipher for a missing child thought to have survived a shipwreck, and a vision of a rigidly ordered polis on an island off Tierra del Fuego inhabited, as Perec ...”

“... of Aylesbury. The originators of successful brand names deserve to be remembered. According to Alan Jackson’s London’s Metropolitan Railway (1986), the name Metroland was the inspiration of James Garland, a copywriter in the company’s publicity department, who was laid up with flu but leapt out of bed in high Archimedean excitement when the name ...”

“... and death count for little or nothing, the greatness of the soul for much or all’) and then on Gilbert Murray’s The Classical Tradition in Poetry, in 1928. In that review, Bailey called for ‘elevated subjects’, and cried: ‘If life be not a great thing, why speak of it at all?’ Against this, came Modernism’s plea for the fragmented, the ...”

“... towards maintaining large, sunny open spaces, even in early prehistory. Twenty years ago, Alan Smith and other archaeologists proposed that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers would have found an advantage in enlarging and manipulating grassy areas where wild grazing animals gathered, and in encouraging nuts and berries to grow on the edge of the wood or in ...”

“... Prima gave birth to a second daughter in 1962 and not long afterwards married the actor and model Alan Marlowe: he was queer, ‘a man I’d never fall in love with, so he seemed like a good person to marry’. Together they founded the New York Poets Theatre (they also had two children). Di Prima wrote plays, acted, directed and produced. They put on dramas ...”

“... more an obsessive than an intellectual. Secrest tells a story of a meeting Sondheim had with Alan Ayckbourn. This is what Ayckbourn reported: He speaks very, very fast and very, very quietly and he tends, certainly with people he doesn’t know, to stare anywhere but at the person. I talk very, very fast and very, very quietly and don’t stare at ...”

“... are in fundamentally different categories. That is the beginning of a lesson well taught by Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind forty years ago. Indeed minds, unlike computers, are not things at all. We use the noun ‘mind’ often enough, but not to pick out a class of entities. It does not even work much like the matching words in the French or ...”

“... Spitalfields, stride for stride in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears. They look worried – like posh ...”

“... month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about my Diary prompts me to write to him. I remind him that when he and I last met several decades ago he was sitting astride a rocking-horse in Gloucester Crescent while he and Jonathan Miller made fun of sociologists (an easy ...”

“... intellectuals, alien Jews and international pederasts who call themselves the Labour Party,’ Alan Bennett had Richard Hannay, Buchan’s most famous hero, muse in Forty Years On (1968). Another West End send-up of The Thirty-Nine Steps finished a nine-year run in September 2015, a century after the final instalment of Buchan’s best-known novel appeared ...”

“... American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ‘know-it-all’ is an ...”

“... Klein Man v. Ralph Lauren Man. The lengthy feature quoted experts from the menswear designer Alan Flusser to the fashion historian Anne Hollander, who noted that ‘Bush looking casual on his ranch appears as if he’s the master of untold acres … It looks as if he owns Texas rather than governs it.’ Gore’s efforts to look relaxed were mocked by ...”

“... origins and politics were no less an issue. ‘The riff-raff takes over,’ the Tory MP Sir Gilbert Longden complained, while to his colleague Gerald Howarth it was a case of ‘another probable Bolshie poet seeking to impose his frustrations on the rest of us’. Just as Harrison’s English teacher wouldn’t allow him to impose his low-life Yorkshire ...”