Nigel Rees - A Word In Your Shell-Like стр 8.

Alexander weeping for want of worlds to conquer The allusion is, undoubtedly, to Plutarchs wonderful vignette of Alexander the Great to be found in Of the Tranquillity of the Mind: So reason makes all sorts of life easy, and every change pleasant. Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds, and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer: Do not you think it is a matter worthy of lamentation, that, when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one? But Crates with only his scrip and tattered cloak laughed out his life jocosely, as if he had been

always at a festival. So it was not so much that Alexander wept because he had run out of worlds to conquer but because he felt that he had not even managed to conquer this one.

(an) Alice-blue gown The colour of the garment, a light-greenish blue, takes its name from a particular Alice daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. The song Alice-blue Gown was written for her by Joseph McCarthy and Harry Tierney in 1900, when she was sixteen, though apparently it was not published until 1919. In the late 1930s, there was another (British) song, called The Girl in the Aliceblue Gown.

Alice in Wonderland Quoted from almost as extensively as Shakespeare and the Bible, Alices Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), both by Lewis Carroll, are alluded to for their particular characters and incidents and as a whole, to denote a mad, fantastic world. From Chips: the Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, entry for 30 July 1940 (1967): The big FO debate began with an absurd Alice in Wonderland wrangle about procedure which lasted from 3.45 until 5.30in war time! it was ludicrous in the extreme.

(is) alive and well and living inThis format phrase probably began in a perfectly natural way Whats happened to old so-and-so? Oh, hes still alive and well and living in Godalming etc. In the preface to His Last Bow (1917), Conan Doyle wrote: The Friends of Mr Sherlock Holmes will be glad to learn that he is still alive and well The extended form was given a tremendous fillip when the Belgian-born songwriter and singer Jacques Brel (192978) became the subject of an off-Broadway musical show entitled Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (196872). Quite why M. Brel should have merited this WHERE ARE THEY NOW? treatment is not too apparent, but the format caught on. The Listener (3 October 1968), quoting the Daily Mail, stated: The Goon Show is not dead. It is alive and well, living in Yorkshire and operating under the name of BBC Radio Leeds. The format had earlier probably been used in religious sloganeering, possibly prompted by Time Magazines famous cover (circa 1966), IS GOD DEAD? The New Statesman (26 August 1966) quoted a graffito, God is alive and living in Argentina. This suggests that the formula might have been used originally in connection with Nazi war criminals who had escaped prosecution and lived unharmed in South America. Other graffiti have included: God is not Dead but Alive and Well and working on a Much Less Ambitious Project quoted in The Guardian (27 November 1975); Jesus Christ is alive and well and signing copies of the Bible at Foyles (quoted in 1980). In a letter to The Independent Magazine (13 March 1993), M. H. I. Wright wrote: When I was a medical student and young house physician 50 years ago, we had to write very detailed case-sheets on every patient admitted. Under the heading Family History, we detailed each member of his family for example, Father, died of heart diseases in 1935; Mother, alive and well and living in London. One pedantic consultant insisted we drop the word alive because, as he said, how could the relative be dead and well? On the other hand, a US film in 1975 was burdened with the title Sheila Devine Is Dead and Living in New York. The last English eccentric is alive and well and living comfortably in Oakland Time Magazine (5 September 1977); The golden age detective story is alive and well review in The Times of Ruth Rendells Put On By Cunning (1981); Socialism is alive and well and living in Moscow headline in The Independent (25 June 1990).

all aboard the Skylark See ANY MORE FOR THE SKYLARK.

all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others A fictional slogan from George Orwells Animal Farm (1945), his commentary on the totalitarian excesses of Communism. It had been anticipated: Hesketh Pearson recalled in his biography of the actor/manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1956) that Tree wished to insert one of his own epigrams in a play by Stephen Phillips called Nero, produced in 1906. It was: All men are equal except myself. In Noël Cowards This Year of Grace (1928), there is this exchange Pellet: Men are all alike. Wendle: Only some more than others. The saying alludes, of course, to Thomas Jeffersons All men are created equal and independent, from the Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence (1776). It has, perhaps, the makings of a format phrase in that it is more likely