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“... is poetry at its most unpredictable: we wouldn’t be surprised to find a pop-up V-sign over the page. Alan Jenkins has made a good job of selecting from Reading’s ten previous volumes for this Essential Reading, and supplies a helpful Note for new readers. In these packed 230 pages (no wide open spaces in Reading) we ...”

“... Rehearsing his part in a production of The Birthday Party at Scarborough, the young Alan Ayckbourn asked Harold Pinter for a little more information about the fictional character. Pinter said: ‘Mind your own fucking business. Concentrate on what’s there.’ It’s a good answer, and Ayckbourn no doubt took it kindly and got the point ...”

“... never know that from reading Campbell. Right from the start he is boiling with rage. Barely a page passes without someone being called a twat, prat, cunt or wanker. He combines a remorselessly tribal and one-sided approach with a complete conviction about his own high moral purpose. All this adds up to his being, in the phrase of Charles Moore, ‘the ...”

“... touches, ripples, curves and smiles’. There are soft touches like that to lighten the load of Alan Brien’s enormous, fact-studded novel about Lenin’s life, from 1886 to 1923. Lenin describes a German carnival scene in 1901, choosing his words carefully, as if he were a theatre reviewer. In 1917 he swims in a Finnish lake and is confronted by an ...”

“... to him by a colonel in the Civil Affairs Division. By mid-September Bernays submitted a six-page scheme, the essential idea of which was to try, on a charge of conspiracy, not only the major war criminals, but also the organisations by which the Nazi state had carried out that conspiracy. Once these organisations had been judicially pronounced ...”

“... and workmanlike way. Small pictures, rarely bigger than a postcard, appear on virtually every page. The biographical entries are inevitably pretty spare. The normal limit seems to have been about fifty words, which must have presented the contributors with an acute challenge. Radical defeatism, à la Groucho Marx, would be one response: the sort of life ...”

“... asserted that any findings by UN inspectors would carry no weight with him. The unclassified four-page intelligence summary he released to the public – according to Congressman Alan Grayson, the 12-page classified document is no different in this respect – speaks from the position of ...”

“... war experiences but seems on the whole to have done well despite his unsoldierly sloppiness. As Alan Judd remarks, his war service deserved more praise than it got – another instance of his chronic bad luck. Allen Tate once told me that after Ford’s death he helped Janice Biala, Ford’s widow, to sell the author’s papers to Princeton. They rented a ...”

“... or on ‘My Father’s Gay Funeral’. Death Valley grew out of various journeys in America that Alan Ross made in the 1970s. The sense of travel is constant: Ross delights in place names, highway numbers, lists, descriptions. Too much so: the effect is often that of jottings in a notebook (to which he refers in a number of poems); in ‘West from ...”

“... tendency, sentimental in its rage about the lost innocence of a proletariat corrupted by holidays, page-three pin-ups, vinyl sofas and tin cans. It’s as if a working class that can’t mend its own shoes or bake its own bread can’t make the revolution either. And so they see the working class, not as a majority without power, but as helpless and ...”

“... to Manila. From a miniature of Selim I by Nakkaş Osman (c.1580). This is the story that Alan Mikhail, a professor of history at Yale, recounts in God’s Shadow. While the history of global competition isn’t new – to scholars at least – Mikhail places the Ottomans and their fellow Muslims at its centre, drawing on recent research to show that ...”

“... hand. But this isn’t Hensher’s point. He takes the view that we impress our individuality on a page when we make signs with a pen or pencil, that our culture is reaffirmed as we persist in the practice, and that the production of handwritten texts is a rich expression of both. If handwriting disappears, he warns, ‘some other elements of civilised life ...”

“... bear is turned into a totem of masculinity – masculinity as imagined by a boy – and called Alan Measles. Since 2003 Perry has established himself as an accomplished and adventurous broadcaster on such subjects as class and gender. His new book, The Descent of Man, isn’t designed to accompany the Channel Four series All Man, but reuses some of the ...”

“... the strength of design and the elegance of writing. Cairns’s book can be consulted: every page is headed with the year, a marked improvement on Barzun. It can also be read with pleasure as a narrative. Cairns’s method of acknowledging his sources is deliberately unobtrusive: no references to the fifty pages of notes appear in the ...”

“... There is not much left that cannot be done on two wheels. On the last page of this opulent book is a photograph of the Young Theatre of Riga performing Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich on bicycles. We are not told what the critics said about this event. Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of messenger boys delivering pizzas on unicycles? The author, Pryor Dodge, withholds his own opinion ...”