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“... It’s not very clear what The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven is really about, or why Alan Warner has written it. It’s not that it’s conspicuously awful or straightforwardly confusing, like some of his other novels. It’s clear enough what’s happening and where; for the most part, it’s gently diverting, sometimes even entertaining ...”

“... from the oriel window on the west side of the table between Holmes and Simopoulos whose host, Alan Taylor, had the end seat ... In SCR I was at the opposite end of the horseshoe to the Vice-president, the only consequence of which was that the melon gave out before it reached me. But there were peaches, nectarines, grapes, apples, oranges, dates and ...”

“... with the noise Of rubbery foghorns. In the early hours, Sleepless, they cruise Beaufort Street, Light on the river behind them Like marbled endpapers, swilling Under bridges. On such nights In convoy ships lowed like cattle, Sixth senses warning of proximity. Hearing them I wake sweating. In Battersea the gold Japanese pagoda Looms out of darkness, mist ...”

“... instead Of warmth and clarity, and bright Colours for everything, we saw A shadow land, a listless light Which neither of us understood: A place so closed and small and black It nearly hurt, smiling, gripping Our glasses harder, coming ...”

“... places, names no one had heard till then, where the sun was not allowed to set but where the light was fiercer anyway. It was God’s will, like the deaths they bloomed to, leeches clinging to their heads in place of clouds of hair . . . I put them back and went out to the garden – there the honeysuckle dripped, and dew-drops hung like convex mirrors ...”

“... and rap). In his essay on rap in Present Tense – one of the best things in the collection – Alan Light writes that rap is ‘the genre that speaks most directly to and for its audience, full of complications, contradictions and confusion’. Beadle ignores the fast-moving complexities of rap in order to concentrate on Public Enemy, rap’s prime ...”

“... was crowded. Couldn’t get in,’ her brother Carrol Waymon recalled of her initial wallop, in Alan Light’s gossipy What Happened, Miss Simone?, ‘inspired’ by Liz Garbus’s 2015 documentary of the same name. The gravity and grace of her performance – her moody interpolation of lyrics played against a filigree of dissonant chord clusters ...”

“... in some of his poems. By rights all such schools should be free schools, as indeed in the light of their origins, should many public schools. The nearest public school to us in Yorkshire is Giggleswick which started off as the local grammar school. It’s certainly not free today, though like many public schools its exclusiveness shelters behind what ...”

“... said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony and Cleopatra. The version put on at Stratford opened with Antony making love to Cleopatra, his head up her skirts. Cunnilingus served cold, as it were, was quite hard for a Stratford ...”

“... punctuated by bouts of frenzied activity. The scene in Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade in which Lord Raglan and his party view the charge from a nearby hilltop is (perhaps deliberately) very like watching the making of a film. The terminology of film – ‘cut’, ‘shoot’, ‘action’, ‘reload’ – is the terminology of ...”

“... widow’s death. She outlived him by 60 years, and at last this memorial compilation can see the light of day, the letters including a few of Asquith’s verses, such as the fine parody of Kipling’s ‘Soldiers of the Queen’: The sun like a Bishop’s bottom        Rosy and round and hot Looked down upon us who shot ’em        And down ...”

“... is probably no place on earth that offers a greater range of supernatural services: palmistry, light-reading, deity visitations, exorcism, astrology, numerology, talismans, vows, curses, black magic (huniyam), and much more. My wife visited one of the most famous astrologers – I’ll call him Fernando – who is consulted by everyone from the president ...”

“... so still seems contemporary. The most startling revelation is that it includes a character called Alan Bennet (sic) who is described as ‘in his late forties. He is neatly dressed but there is an indefinable quality of failure about him’.Coward’s play was staged in September 1960, a month after Beyond the Fringe, and a year after I had appeared on the ...”

“... Mid-December. It was eight in the morning and Venus was hanging like a wrecker’s light above the Black Craig. The hill itself – seen from our kitchen window – was still in silhouette, though the sky was lightening to a pale yellow-grey. It was a weakling light, stealing into the world like a thief through a window someone forgot to close ...”

“... irradiate obiter dicta as facets of the creative life, they are none the less eager to shine their light on their own work. At its best, self-consciousness is forgotten and the act of self-explanation becomes a part of the self-vindication of the work and even of the creative process in general. The interview is a medium obtained from television. In print, the ...”