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“... Stephen Spender (because of his experience de-Nazifying German libraries after the war) and Alan Ross. When I mention that Ross served in the Navy and, in poems like ‘Murmansk’, recalls the war in the Baltic, Stabnikov seems satisfied. We pass the now famous queue outside McDonald’s, where, I am told, customers wait four hours outside and then an ...”

“... the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a ...”

“... is sowed into every scene and stanza of his work. Herons, in Tess, which arrive ‘with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters’. Winter winds, in the poem ‘The Prospect’: ‘Iced airs wheeze through the skeletoned hedge from the north.’ Hares, in ‘The Haunter’: ‘Where the shy hares print long paces’. ‘Beech leaves, that yellow ...”

“... though they were picked principally for their skill at chess. One of them, another Kingsman, was Alan Turing, who, with Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex, was foremost among those who decoded Ultra, encyphered on the Enigma machine, and, perhaps more than any single person, helped to save us from defeat in the battle of the Atlantic. When suddenly Japanese ...”

“... figures in his life had turned his mind towards Marxism: his cousin Phyllis Kemp, and the composer Alan Bush. He signed up, albeit briefly, to the Communist Party of Great Britain before switching his allegiance from Stalin to Trotsky. British communists regarded support for Trotsky, by then expelled from the Soviet Union, as ideologically suspect, and ...”

“... But by the early 1990s, feminist hostility to fashion began to abate, and here and there a few bold voices spoke up on behalf of clothing, not only as legitimate self-fashioning, but also as that most prestigious of academic theoretical categories, a discourse. In their collection of essays, On Fashion (1994), Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferris traced the ...”

“... These hostesses (for Mrs Ransome now began to watch regularly) were all much of a muchness, big, bold and, Mrs Ransome thought, with far too much self-confidence (she thought this was what they meant by ‘feisty’ and would have looked it up in Mr Ransome’s dictionary but wasn’t sure how it was spelled). They had names that defied ...”

“... Plan’ to guarantee ‘the common security of the whole world’. Well after the 1980s, when Alan Milward dismantled the myth that the Marshall Plan had injected capital into a continent that lacked it, rather than unlocking capital already there and speeding up a recovery already underway, liberal historians – mostly American – continued to extol ...”

“... With the GSU to protect him, the President was never in serious danger, but the gesture was bold nonetheless. And highly successful. In a matter of days incipient tribal animosity was transformed into admiration (if grudging in some quarters) for a powerful leader. The country relaxed and the journalists went home. The Mboya assassination takes up just ...”

“... party, but explanations of the 2019 defeat that seem to have been held over from 2017 – such as Alan Johnson’s comment, within moments of the exit poll, that Momentum should be purged – are inadequate. At the very least, any inquiry should account for the drop-off from Labour’s performance in 2017; it should also try to explain the ...”

“... in him each time she pushed her pram past his ‘bench by the weir’. (‘And yet when I was bold enough to speak to her – not having been introduced – she threatened to call a policeman.’) The main outcome of Beckett’s enthusiasm, however, was a quickening of the tempo of his communications with Bray, a Cambridge graduate in her mid-thirties who ...”

“... hard to imagine anything less engaging or novelistic, but the vitality of the whole, the sense of Alan Bennett characters filled with Old Testament fervour, was strong enough to blot it out. Towards the end of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit the narrator wonders what would have happened if she had stayed in the church. She decides she would have been a priest ...”

“... in on him from all directions. What has enabled him to do this has been in part his consistently bold use of his powers of patronage and appointment; in part, a similarly audacious series of initiatives on the world stage; in part, the welcome (though less so now) effects of a much greater and more consistent liberality than ever before seen in the Soviet ...”

“... the Mall every time. Lloyd Bentsen, the prince of Capitol influence-peddlers, gets the Treasury. Alan Greenspan, the reactionary fan of Ayn Rand, who has roosted at the Federal Reserve these many years, is beseeched to ‘stay on’. Winston Lord, an old Kissinger hand, gets the Asia desk at State. Les Aspin, a plaything of the military contractors, is ...”

“... nations. And that brings me to my second contentious, revisionist idea. It comes from the late Alan Milward, iconoclast of recent European history. His book The European Rescue of the Nation-State (1992) knocked the wheels off conventional accounts of how the European Community arose, and it is still angrily argued over. Milward derides the received idea ...”