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“... The Independent pursues its campaign against John Birt over his tax arrangements. On another page it boasts its acquisition of Jim Slater as its Stock Exchange commentator.13 March. To Weston to see Mam, who is dulleyed, expressionless, absent. The sun is hot through the blinds and the radio full on. ‘My,’ says a nurse (who’s not really a ...”

“... But the separation of spheres wasn’t without its detractors. As Anya Burgon has suggested, Alan of Lille, a scholar at Chartres in the 12th century, employed a vivid allegory in his Anticlaudianus to endorse an older, apprenticeship-style education system, as opposed to the professionalisation of disciplines he witnessed at the new universities. ...”

“... criticisms. Stephen Jay Gould spoke out in the New Yorker of 28 November. I especially recommend Alan Ryan’s analysis in the New York Review of Books of 17 November, followed in the 1 December issue by Charles Lane’s examination of some of the sources of statistical information in this book, sources closely connected with an Edinburgh publication, the ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel is a spoiled gift which, as an ugly baby makes us search for deficiencies in its attractive parents, forces us to reconsider its creator’s talents. That Hollinghurst possesses great talents is certainly not in question. There is probably no novelist alive with such a deeply historical feeling for English poetic lyricism ...”

“... close to the wind in this passage, and indeed in Edward II as a whole. Even allowing, as Alan Bray scrupulously does in Homosexuality in Renaissance England, for an element of exaggeration and possible misrepresentation in the famous ‘Baines note’, in which the dramatist is reported as saying that Christ enjoyed carnal relations with John, the ...”

“... the Sickert portrait of Beaverbrook and the cases of Lloyd George memorabilia, the high priest Alan Taylor himself, presiding gnome-like over the shrine of his late friend and mentor the arch-hobgoblin, whose life he was writing. But, best of all, around the walls hung a wonderful selection of original Low cartoons. The Beaverbrook Library was an ...”

“... Joined for all time on the title-page of the Book that Made the Modern World are Isaac Newton (who wrote the Principia Mathematica) and Samuel Pepys (who, as President of the Royal Society, licensed it to be printed). It is one of the oddest couples in the history of thought: the man who, as a late 17th-century Cambridge student was heard to say, had ‘writt a book that neither he nor any body else understands’ and one of the multitude who understood scarcely a word of it; the wholly other and the all-too-human; the virgin ascetic who accused John Locke of trying to ‘embroil’ him with women, and the supreme London boulevardier whose consuming passions included Château Haut-Brion, the theatre and serial embroilments with women ...”

“... Davies is a sturdy original, and china shops bring out the bull in him as they did in his master, Alan Taylor. He once wrote a history of Poland backwards (Heart of Europe), starting with General Jaruzelski and ending with the Iron Age settlers on the Elbe – an experiment which deserved more applause than it earned. Here he frequently refers to Europe as ...”

“... long, thin swatches of parchment about five foot in length and written on both sides. To turn the page required the co-operation and forbearance of most of the other readers at the table, so it would sometimes look like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party struggling to put up wallpaper when all I was doing was trying to turn over. A side effect of reading these ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the pagination, for example: the final chapter, a reworking of earlier events, uses the same page numbers as the chapter preceding it. The arrangement is frustrating. Peter, the square in the gang, is cornered into keeping the records up to date. To avoid getting roughed up by his friends, he files details of their ‘operations’: the boys make ...”

“... in the reading-hungry postwar years, reaching a peak of 49,000 in 1950 under the editorship of Alan Pryce-Jones, and stayed above 40,000 until the beginning of the 1970s.Since the sale of the Times to Rupert Murdoch in 1981, the TLS has once again been a minor part of a sprawling media empire, a province granted a partial autonomy that is hedged round with ...”

“... nature of his work, unusual humour. Yet in the very first paragraph of his very first page he pitches face-forward into the enduring fallacy that sustains our monarchical cult: ‘To have been born in 1894, eldest son of the eldest surviving son of the eldest son of the Queen Empress, was to be heir to an almost intolerable burden of rights and ...”

“... one phrase I particularly admired, envied even. When Ken returned, he stabbed his finger at the page. ‘That’s it! What I wrote was: “Everything that passes through the hands of Mr Welles acquires a touch of poetry.” ’ I could not bring myself to tell him that the compositor’s slip had been, for me, the most penetrating insight in the essay. In ...”

“... The ‘pretty little Lady Belchamber’ is a heartless monster, and a very gripping one on the page, given the benefit of Sturgis’s most witheringly sarcastic manner; while Sainty himself, with his ‘terrible habit of appreciating other people’s points of view’, seems to sympathise with her even as she is destroying him. To that New York Times ...”