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“... imaginative device, and ought to work well. For the commentating Che Guevara of the stage musical Alan Parker has substituted a ubiquitous, many-roled Argentinian ‘bloke’ (the colloquial che is not really translatable because it is used where the parallel words are not used in other languages, but it means something like ‘pal’, or ‘mate’, or ...”

“... The producers were Barry Levinson and his partner, Mark Johnson. We had first met when Levinson, Alan Parker and I had dinner in London. It was a wonderfully smug affair: the last three films we had directed, Rain Man, Mississippi Burning and Dangerous Liaisons, had between them received 23 Oscar nominations. Levinson himself was to have made Donnie ...”

“... a green Halston trouser suit.’) Next on the list are Bob Geldof and Paula Yates: According to Alan [Parker], Bob had a cock so big that he needed a wheelbarrow to carry it around in . . . But one didn’t need to have coffee with Alan Parker to know that Bob had a big ...”

“... couple who alternate between starving and gorging themselves. (The novel was turned into a film by Alan Parker, starring Anthony Hopkins, John Cusack and Bridget Fonda.) In A Friend of the Earth Boyle turns his squinting attention to environmentalism, creating a disconcerting marriage of farce and prophecy: he doesn’t doubt the looming apocalypse; he ...”

“... to the record sleeve, Bowie played most of the guitar on Diamond Dogs (1974) himself. But Alan Parker, whose contribution is acknowledged for only one song, ‘1984’, perhaps deserves more credit than that. Of the guitar part on ‘Rebel Rebel’, Parker told Trynka: ‘I can tell my own playing, and my own ...”

“... The second part of Alan Walker’s projected three-volume life of Liszt opens with events any biographer would relish. At the height of an immensely successful, indeed unprecedented career as an international virtuoso of the piano, Liszt, aged 35 and (as he felt) nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, decided on a complete change ...”

“... Biddle, an aristocratic New Deal Democrat who had been Roosevelt’s Attorney-General, and John J. Parker, a US circuit court judge, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court in 1930 by President Hoover, but rejected by the Senate owing to opposition by labour and blacks. Although the Russians proposed that Biddle preside over the tribunal, he declined on ...”

“... of his Thematic Catalogue, scrupulously transcribed, edited and introduced by Albi Rosenthal and Alan Tyson. The Thematic Catalogue has, as it happens, been published in facsimile before, but that earlier edition ‘did not, as does the present one, reproduce the blank but fully stave-ruled pages following Mozart’s final entry’. There are 14 of these ...”

“... I was reading – and then reviewing for this very publication – a biography of Franz Liszt by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in ...”

“... All about Eve, to any Western saloon, booze is the magnifier for all that 30-foot-tall emoting. As Alan Rudolph’s lugubrious 1995 biopic of Dorothy Parker, Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, illustrates, it was Prohibition that made boozing an essential act of transgression among the ...”

“... Alan Macfarlane likes to shock historians out of their complacency and out of a narrow preoccupation with their own period or their own mode of historical study. He is a professionally-trained historian and a professionally-trained anthropologist and his approach is truly interdisciplinary rather than multidisciplinary ...”

“... goes. ‘“I dare say,” drawled Al’ – Al being Muriel Spark’s publisher, the young Alan Maclean – ‘“that this is the shape of things to come.” It was a risky saying, for many fine first novels are followed by duds. However, I took great heart from what he said, and went on my way rejoicing.’The years leading up to this occasion for ...”

“... in the recent RA exhibition is hard to understand. 17 January. The Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker-Bowles come to The Lady in the Van. Normally royalty is guaranteed to put a frost on an audience but their presence peps things up and it’s a very good house. This is because, unlike most royal persons, the Prince of Wales actually laughs and loudly too ...”

“... papers are full of the latest scandal, the bugged phone call between the Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker-Bowles. I read none of it, as I didn’t read the earlier Diana tapes, not out of disapproval or moral superiority, just genuine lack of interest. I wish it would all go away. Sickened by the self-righteousness of the newspapers, which, though it takes a ...”

“... his fame – A true wit wouldn’t hint it, much less crow it. Poor knackered Nicky thinks he’s Alan Coren: He’s just a wee laird with a twitching sporran. And yet it’s wise to give conceit expression – Within the limits set by the absurd. A boast might be self-serving like Confession But similarly festers if unheard. Much meekness stands revealed ...”