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“... At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by Tristram) as one of the books he was putting in the guest bedrooms at ...”

“... bed, she told the journalist, there were strange happenings. A tumbler spontaneously shattered, a light bulb from the bedside lamp migrated, still hot and intact, to the other side of the room; a pot of face cream, flying through the air, narrowly missed Don, their son, who was coming to their aid, and their lodger, George, was hit by coins (a shilling and a ...”

“... will be bothered by Eggers’s need to portray Zeitoun as unrelentingly virtuous, especially in light of recent developments: Zeitoun was charged last year with repeatedly assaulting – and soliciting the murder of – his wife. Eggers’s detractors, of course, have made hay of Zeitoun’s fall from grace: according to this version, the author’s need to ...”

“... the dark abysses of human behaviour in the 1930s. To write as he does without rancour and with a light but biting wit, neatly captured in a good translation, is an intellectual victory in itself. But it is the comprehensive nature of the undertaking, its determination to synthesise all previous work on this complicated subject while also reinterpreting it in ...”

“... unclear whether she is ignorant of or just doesn’t care about what her brother-in-timelines, Alan, describes as ‘all the time-travel stories about people accidentally obliterating themselves’. Still, it keeps the plot moving. Nadia criss-crosses space and time, going from New York to wartime Budapest. Meanwhile, she grapples with what her grandmother ...”

“... up, the force of the torrent is too much for his companions: as they struggle to pull him out, his light still shining through the water, he drowns. The students are later found unharmed. What the feelings of the rescuers must be when, having lost one of their colleagues, they come upon the students is hard to imagine. Some harsh words spoken, or no words ...”

“... and chronicled the resulting ‘devastation’: his incompetence at bed-making, his inability to light the oven, the misery of his solitary meals. In the middle of reading one such bulletin, I rang the Taylors’ home to take his proof marks. Eva Taylor answered the phone: she was home and she was better. What had hospital been like? ‘Very interesting. But ...”

“... me.‘Aren’t you famous?’‘Well I can’t be, can I, if you don’t know my name.’‘It’s Alan something.’‘Yes.’‘From Scarborough?’‘No.’‘So which Alan are you?’‘I’m another Alan.’‘Are you just a lookalike?’‘Well, you could say so.’He pats my arm ...”

“... in the constant literary references which view Noël Coward, Ivor Novello and Robert Newton in the light of Garrick’s theatrical world, or his pungent romance with Miss Julia set against Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris. It is not just a world of politesse and enlightenment that is referred to. Boswell (who provides the best of Mr Quennell’s Four Portraits) is ...”

“... admission may sometimes be unavoidable. This is my sentiment as I contemplate the four novels of Alan Warner. He has been highly praised (‘dazzling’, ‘classic’, ‘significant’, ‘vastly gifted’, ‘a genius’, ‘one of the most influential literary mould-breakers ever’), and I’m sure none of these eulogies, understandably preserved on the ...”

“... seemed less crass and been easier to swallow. (A voice from a French lakeside: ‘But, my dear Alan, why should it be easy to swallow? I didn’t want it to be “easy to swallow” as you put it.’) There are odd surprises in Lambert’s book. That Lindsay should have had a stab at transcendental meditation and even been given a mantra is understandable ...”

“... The first picture in Richard Avedon’s folio is captioned ‘Alan Silvey, drifter, Route 93, Chloride, Nevada’. Such photographs were taken in the Dustbowl fifty years ago. But this is art, not documentation. We have learned a lot about photography since the Thirties, and now no one believes that truth is simple – ‘all photographs are accurate ...”

“... responded mainly to its single-minded concentration on the personality of the hero as revealed by Alan Howard’s performance. This dominated the production and whatever our personal opinions might have been, it was clearly a grand achievement. It had an immediate appeal, and that is a final, or almost final, dramatic test. I have not myself seen it, but the ...”

“... with a very great knowledge of the intellectual background of MacDiarmid’s work and so casts light on some dark places. Her study goes up only to 1934, but that means that it covers the whole of the formative period. It is to be hoped that she will one day complete her work with a further volume – a possibility, one gathers, once she is ready with ...”

“... 3 January. Alan Bates dies on 27 December and we break the journey from Yorkshire at Derby in order to go to his funeral. It’s at Bradbourne, a tiny village the taxi-driver has never heard of, and he and his Asian colleagues have a map session before we eventually head off into the Derbyshire hills. The cab is old and draughty, it’s beginning to snow and as we drive through this landscape of lost villages and frostbitten fields it gets more and more foggy and like a journey out of Le Grand Meaulnes ...”