beauty (I’ve got you where I want you)! A phrase suggestive of 19th-century melodramas or, at least, parodies of their style. Dryden has the phrase ‘proud beauty’ in Oedipus (1679).
ahh, Bisto! Advertising line for Bisto gravy browning, which has been promoted with this cry in the UK since 1919. The name ‘Bisto’ is a hidden slogan, too. When the Cerebos company first put it on the market in 1910, the product did not have a name. According to legend, the initial letters of the proposed slogan ‘Browns, Seasons, Thickens In One’ were rearranged to produce ‘BISTO’. The Bisto Kids, drawn by Will Owen, first appeared in 1919, sniffing a wisp of gravy aroma and murmuring, ‘Ahh Bisto!’ This is a phrase much played on in political cartoon captions over the years – ‘Ah, Blitzo!’; ‘Ah, Bizerta!’; ‘Ah, Crippso!’; ‘Ah! Winston!’; ‘Ah! Coupon free!’, and so on.
ah,Woodbine – a great little cigarette! A slogan current in 1957. Norman Hackforth – the Mystery Voice from BBC radio’s Twenty Questions – spoke the line memorably in TV ads.
—Aid PHRASES In the mid-1980s, it became fashionable to give names with the suffix ‘—aid’ to charitable fundraising events. This stemmed from the first such event – the recording of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, performed in 1984 by an ad hoc group of pop singers and musicians called Band Aid, in punning allusion to the Band-Aid brand of medical dressing. This record, successfully drawing attention to those suffering in the Ethiopian civil war and famine, prepared the way for the notable foundation of the Live Aid rock concert of July 1985. Similar, though in some cases much smaller-scale, events followed, including Sport Aid (sponsored athletes), Mandarin Aid (civil servants), School Aid (children), Fashion Aid, Academy Aid (painters), Sheep Aid (agricultural events in Yorkshire) and Deaf Aid (no, only joking).
ain’t it a shame, eh? ain’t it a shame? Catchphrase spoken by Carleton Hobbs as a nameless man who told banal tales (‘I waited for hours in the fish queue…and a man took my plaice’), in the BBC radio show ITMA (1939–49). He always prefaced and concluded his remarks with, ‘Ain’t it a shame?’
ain’t it grand to be bloomin’ well dead? Title line of a song (1932) by Leslie Sarony, the British entertainer and writer (1897–1985).
aisle See GO UP THE.
Ajax defying the lightning Phrase for a particular artistic pose in 19th-century sculpture or painting. From Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Chap. 18 (1853): ‘Well!’ said Mr Boythorn…I am looked upon about here, as a second Ajax defying the lightning. Ha ha ha ha!’ From Oscar Wilde’s New York lecture ‘The English Renaissance of Art’ (9 January 1882): ‘The English [artists’] models form a class entirely by themselves. They are not so picturesque as the Italian, nor so clever as the French, and they have absolutely no tradition, so to speak, of their order. Now and then some old veteran knocks at the studio door, and proposes to sit as Ajax defying the lightning, or as King Lear upon the blasted heath.’ The Ajax referred to in this is not the warrior of the siege of Troy but Ajax the Lesser who was at the siege nevertheless and raped Priam’s daughter Cassandra after dragging her from a statue of Athena. This so annoyed the goddess that she shipwrecked Ajax on his way home. He clung to a rock, defied the goddess, not to mention the lightning, and was eventually washed off and drowned by Neptune. So, how and when did the allusion turn into a phrase? In the description of Ajax’s death in Homer’s Odyssey, the lightning incident is not mentioned. So is it from a later re-telling? Virgil’s Aeneid (Bk 1, line 42-) does show him being dealt with by Zeus’s bolts. Earlier, the matter was mentioned, though less specifically, by Euripides in his Trojan Women and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Bk 14; translated by Dryden, Pope and others). There are a number of representations in art of Ajax the Lesser going about his rapes and so on, but the search is still on for the lightning-defying pose. Was there a particular painting or a sculpture of the event that so fixed the defiant image that it was readily evoked thereafter?
alarums and excursions (sometimes alarms…) Confused noise and activity after the varying use of the phrase in the stage directions of Shakespeare’s history plays, notably Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III, especially during battle scenes. ‘Alarum’ is a form of ‘alarm’ (meaning a call to arms) and an ‘excursion’ is a sally against the enemy. Now used about any sort of confused situation. ‘I was a happy child, skipping through the fifties, a time of calm and convention for the middle classes, with parents thankful for routine and certainty after the alarms and excursions of war’ – Kate Adie, The Kindness of Strangers, Chap. 2 (2002).
(The) Albany Whether this is a phrase or not rests on one’s response to a supposed solecism: is it correct to use the ‘The’ or not to use the ‘The’ when talking about Albany, a grand apartment block in Piccadilly, London? Oscar Wilde uses the full phrase ‘The Albany’ no fewer than three times in The Importance of Earnest (1895). He also used it earlier in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chap. 3 (1890). The earliest use so far found of the ‘the’ being apparently correct usage is in the title of a novel by Marmion Savage, The Bachelor of the Albany (1848). Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, Chap. 43 (1864), has: ‘Plantagenet Palliser…felt, as he sat in his chambers in the Albany, that something else was wanting to his happiness.’ Charles Dickens describes the character ‘Fascination’ Fledgeby as living there in Our Mutual Friend, Pt 2, Chap. 5 (1865): ‘He lived in chambers in the Albany, did Fledgeby, and maintained a spruce appearance’. A resident’s letterhead dating from 1888 is shown in Harry Furniss, Paradise in Piccadilly: the Story of Albany, but the title of that book (published in 1925) is – so far – the earliest example found of the ‘the’ being deliberately excluded. Later, Terence Rattigan (who lived in the chambers for a while) gave this description of the setting for Act 1 of his play While the Sun Shines (1943): ‘The sitting-room of Lord Harpenden’s chambers in Albany, London.’ So what was it that happened between 1898 and 1925 to give rise to the change? Indeed, what is one to make of the whole question? Perhaps H. Montgomery Hyde has the simplest explanation in The Annotated Oscar Wilde (1982): ‘The Albany refers to the exclusive apartments off Piccadilly, very popular with bachelors, that had been converted in the early nineteenth century from the Duke of York and Albany’s large private house. About the turn of the century it became the custom to allude to it as “Albany” instead of “the” Albany, probably because the latter sounded like a club or pub.’
Alexander weeping for want of worlds to conquer The allusion is, undoubtedly, to Plutarch’s 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, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), both by Lewis Carroll,
