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“... 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 ...”

“... comedy at the pictures after that. The so-called ‘morbid’ age was also, as Robert Graves and Alan Hodge suggested in 1940, when calling their social history of the interwar years The Long Weekend, an age of mass pleasures, of the lido, rambling and cycling clubs, the first holiday camps and the dance hall (the ‘Lambeth Walk’ was the national ...”

“... So says Lady Thomasina Coverly, the heroine of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, to her tutor Septimus Hodge. Her question was echoed a century after her (fictitious) life by the unorthodox biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose mathematical investigations of the living world were collected in On Growth and Form, published in 1917. Although they have excited ...”

“... Virginia Woolf​ could be cruelly accurate in her assessments of people. On 24 April 1925 Robert Graves visited her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous rattle headed young man’, and declared ‘the poor boy is all emphasis protestation and pose.’ By 1925 Graves had good reason to be ‘rattle headed’. He had survived Charterhouse school, which he hated ...”

“... butler saw. Lindsay directing Ralph Richardson. A group photo of some critics. ‘Look at them, Alan. I mean, is it surprising?’ He has no pretensions to taste and would presumably despise the word. Coffee over, he starts preparing lunch. He is a hospitable man, though the odd thing is he prepared my lunch separately from his and serves it first, though ...”

“... modernian. 26 October. An interesting letter this morning from Claire Tomalin about the Drummer Hodge scene in The History Boys, saying that, contrary to what Hector specifically asserts in the scene, Hodge was not in the ordinary sense a name but like, as it were, Joe Bloggs, a generic name for a common and unthinking ...”

“... light on the interplay of demographic, economic and social forces in specific communities: was Hodge down in Devon marrying earlier than his dad because his prospects were brightening, because customary village constraints were weakening, or because he didn’t give a damn (Malthus’s nightmare), since the Poor Law would in any case keep him? We are ...”

“... the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which launched Oasis, whose founder, Alan McGee, gave Blair a cool £10,000 to nurture Young Labour and pay for the Youth Rally in Blackpool; it was the same McGee who presented Blair with the band’s platinum disk, and gave the now legendary riposte to Virginia Bottomley when invited to a bash for ...”

“... apparently had no chair of governors, despite legal stipulations. But the school prospectus listed Alan Lewis, a former deputy chair of the Conservative Party, as its ‘executive patron’, and the leaked EFA report concludes that he had been the ‘chair of governors between September 2011 and October 2012’. Lewis also rented the land to the school, at a ...”

“... His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ‘dinosaur’ if they came from a Peter Taaffe or Alan Woods, but he is inoculated against such criticism by his youth and avoidance of jargon. In many respects, he is the best thing to happen to the non-compromised, non-New Labour left in the mainstream media in decades: he makes ideas that are customarily ...”

“... the actress who originally played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary agent), Andrea Dworkin and Iris Murdoch, who ‘sat smiling into the middle-distance while Felix Martin explained the H-bomb to her’. What Moorcock is doing, under the permission of a work of ...”

“... Ville Radieuse relocated to the gardens of Victorian Edgbaston. Sheppard Fidler’s successor, Alan Maudsley, largely responsible for bleak and monolithic developments like Castle Vale and Chelmsley Wood, was jailed in a corruption scandal linking him with the contractors Bryants.Vinen isn’t very interested in style or architecture, which is very ...”

“... that not only was your boss undermining you but that this was happening to other colleagues?’ Alan Johnson, who led the Labour campaign to remain in the EU, has alleged that Corbyn and his team regularly failed to take up agreed positions, avoided taking part in meetings and watered down speeches. (In truth, the pro-EU Labour vote held up pretty well, but ...”