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“... in 1951; five years later, Hancock’s Half Hour introduced two brilliant writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who between them created a character whose sense of social and intellectual confinement puts The Lavender Hill Mob’s bullion robbers in the shade and eventually – after Hancock had morphed into Harold Steptoe – blossomed into something like ...”

“... leaderless, just-in-time disorganised organisation didn’t seem to help. In the late 1990s Alan Greenspan ridiculed the fashionable notion that the dot-com economy could overturn the traditional laws of economic profit and loss: he called it ‘irrational exuberance’. There is now an irrational exuberance about the potential of social media: it’s ...”

“... predominated in Mamet’s work since his classic plays American Buffalo (1977) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). Those plays put us inside his creepy – and now familiar – world of paranoia and mutual suspicion, of small-time tricksters, confidence men and salesmen, of the unstable identification of victim and victimiser, the world of male competition that ...”

“... twitching twat’. In his useful study of the US literary left, Exiles from a Future Time (2002), Alan Wald argues that Hayes’s ‘bitter meditations on class privilege’ had been transmuted into ‘untrammelled and misogynous violence’. This may have played a part in Hayes’s disappearance from public view; certainly his dislike of self-promotion ...”

“... at outrageous human cost to both black and white. In a superb chapter, ‘Towards Australia’, Alan Frost argues that the Aborigines were dispossessed, the convicts exiled and exploited, so that Britain might have a far-south strategic base which could also serve as an off-shore gaol, conveniently remote. Whatever fine words were spoken at the initial ...”

“... often – in a similar vein to fellow conservative challengers Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes, but more effectively. ‘He believed what he said. He didn’t have his finger up in the air to find out which way the wind was blowing.’ Bauer tells how as a child in 1964 he watched a Reagan speech endorsing Barry Goldwater, and told his father ...”

“... praised for being ‘smart enough to see the point’ of his directorial interventions; Jonathan Ross, ‘whose gifts I admired’, is said to ‘put a lot of emphasis on personal appearance, almost as if he had no talent’, though Terry Wogan and Harry Hill are commended more warmly. He signs off with a bulletin on his Pacific War novel: he might not live ...”

“... remembers ecstatically how ‘legend after legend’ arrived at the table. He counts them in: Alan Sugar, Carol Vorderman, Jonathan Ross, Miriam Stoppard, Tony Parsons. Even for someone who started his career in national journalism as a showbiz reporter on the Sun, these are pitifully undemanding exemplars of ...”

“... was not merely that he was a married man with extracurricular interests – he had sex with Robbie Ross for the first time in 1886 – but also that he was most famous for being mocked. No one took him seriously, except himself and his mother and his wife. Wilde’s lectures and poses were better known than his early plays or poems. For a while after his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... instant celebrity to their speaking to and for their ‘low dishonest decade’. Julian Maclaren-Ross was happy to call his recollections Memoirs of the Forties, a decade of which he was so emblematic. But these were artistic and literary lumpings-together, handy tags for something which might in fact have spread over a much longer period (Pater’s most ...”

“... actress in a belated stage version of his prewar novel Afternoon Men – tell no tales. His friend Alan Ross, editor of the London Magazine, thought that surrounded by promiscuous friends, he may have simply found a vicarious pleasure, productive for his fiction, in observing them, while conducting his own marital life with the meticulous sexual ...”

“... Spengler. But one can’t help noticing that those with axe in hand are the Michael Portillos and Alan Clarks and Pat Buchanans and Ross Perots (who don’t choose to share any of their palaces with me or anyone else) and that those with their hands on the gunwale are the Ken Saro-Wiwas and others. A difficult choice? Not ...”

“... cover depicting Marilyn Monroe mussing his hair had cost him his.)Roth’s first choice was Ross Miller, a friend, professor at the University of Connecticut and nephew of the playwright Arthur Miller. Unfortunately, the neph was no chip off the old oak. Hapless is perhaps the kindest word. A workhorse like Roth could only look on aghast at the ...”

“... Dansey, that unattractive deputy head of MI6, was, it appears, seduced at the age of 16 by Robbie Ross. Tom Driberg was ‘put under pressure’ by MI5 to inform on the Communist Party (he was an uninhibited homosexual cruiser) until, Andrew deduces, he was shopped by Anthony Blunt and expelled from the Party by Pollitt in 1941. If, however, we set on one ...”