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“... when it is describing these years. The list of names here, from Val Parnell to Peter Brough, from Alan Melville to Jimmy Edwards, reads like a history of British Variety. Even then, unconsciously a student of Method, she would dress up in gymslip and boater, catapult in hand, to do Monica for the wireless. She went to Hollywood for the first time in the ...”

“... claims made for it by an annoying American visitor. Then the book swallowed me whole (so thanks to Alan Consolatu for the introduction). I read the Bodley Head edition, whose format, relatively narrow if satisfyingly thick, was somehow slightly too compact for so overreaching a book. The original Paris Ulysses was larger, as if unwilling to share a shelf with ...”

“... low over the tops and it feels like a scene from the 1940s. It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch. This isn’t wholly imagination either, as it turns out that there was a camp here during the war for American airborne troops, which makes the survival of these wonderfully elaborate pillars, still here despite all that ...”

“... to Quentin Oates), managed to contain itself for three weeks, until the fourth possible book-page Thursday. It did, however, break silence the previous Thursday by announcing the forthcoming treat. The delay enabled the reviewer to follow the author’s recommendation, broadcast to the nation on both TV and radio, that the book should be read ...”

“... at different times in his life hinted that he voted both Labour and Tory. This misses the point. Alan Bennett says he had little faith that Peter’s drink problem would be solved at Alcoholics Anonymous – Peter’s sense of the ridiculous would be bound to overcome him at the meetings. Similarly, he could never have joined, or with any consistency ...”

“... of ‘did’, perhaps still more in the far cry of ‘had done’, they fade garrulously on the page, unmysteried and unmissed. Mysterious persons are all the rage in Mark Illis’s The Alchemist, which the publisher’s blurb not untruthfully describes as ‘a subtle and richly-layered tale of a child’s nightmarish quest for truth’. Accepting ...”

“... and internal rhyme – and typographical layout: spaced-out lines, stanzas suspended in mid-page, counterpointed islets of text, with the odd word exiled to a margin. Such experiments can be seen at their most radical in Topoemas (1968), a cross between Apollinaire’s calligrammes and oriental ideograms. Though the linear text remained the norm, Paz ...”

“... Frenchman, bore him two sons and then bolted to Manly, still brooding about Katherine. On the last page of the book, she is on the ferry again, listening to battered old Bruiser. Australians tell me that Manly is really quite a smart place and Sydney people go there at weekends by hydrofoil to do their shopping as well as use the beach – but there are ...”

“... leaning. ‘For an accurate translation of Machado’s words’, Paterson refers us to Alan Trueblood’s selection, which gives, he says, ‘a more reliable reflection of the surface life of Machado’s verse’. I assume Paterson is not asking us not to read Machado, only to refrain from petty comparisons, and to treat his own versions as poems ...”

“... that are inserted by people who can’t believe a website would allow anyone to change any page on it (when they discover that they can, but that changes quickly get corrected, the fun wears off). More serious tinkering requires more concerted oversight. From its outset Wikipedia has aimed to operate according to a code of conduct (of which the ...”

“... do understand, through and through, because it is our own invention, or rather the invention of Alan Turing and John von Neumann. The now famous Universal Turing Machine was an imaginary device that could rearrange any row of l’s and 0’s in accordance with any finite set of rules supplied to it; the von Neumann computer is its electronic ...”

“... be that he was long ago misled by the name of a Scottish team: but can it be that his publisher, Alan Ross, suffers the same inveterate delusion? Perhaps this is one of those tiny harmless in-jokes of which the author is so fond, and which contribute so much to one’s entertainment. This last volume is mostly concerned with the Navy, a service in which ...”

“... graphic novels simply enable ‘the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad’; according to Alan Moore, they allow publishers to ‘stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel’. Moore and Satrapi, in common with many others, want their work to be ...”

“... at Sussex, I found myself sitting next to him in a Brighton restaurant; on his other side was Alan Sinfield, and they were discussing the latest betrayal of socialism (I can’t now remember what form it had taken) by the Labour Party. Regular readers of the Letters page in this journal will know how genial, and also ...”

“... 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 ...”