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“... Peter Vansittart, novelist, historian and writer for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself defeated ...”

“... devising new types of midway meeting between man and machine is at a premium in Turner’s work. Peter Corrigan, whose mission in the jungles of New Guinea forms the backbone of the narrative, actually is a camera: that is to say, he has only to look at a scene in order to register it, and subcutaneous circuits enable him to store his footage with maximum ...”

“... in the wilderness. Time alters the past. Gods, too, change ... The exclamatory staccato style is Peter Vansittart’s, and so are some of the words. Many sentences get no further than half a dozen words, some are mere singletons. The manner is intentional, but no more digestible for that. Its chief purpose would seem to be the conveyance of chunks of ...”

“... but be thankful that the war diverted Mass Observation from its initial surrealistic eccentricity.Peter Vansittart’s book is another anthology, but here Bevan’s ‘democracy of facts’ or, in this case, of ‘voices’ applies with a vengeance. It is a follow-up to his successful anthology Voices from the Great War. But those had the unity of the ...”

“... impelled by her upbringing to become a socialist, and even to pass on the contagion to her son – Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International. Her book moves from the site of her father’s first oilfield to the site of her reforming achievements at Marks and Spencer. ‘What were my qualifications?’ she asks in her foreword. ‘A Russian soul, a ...”

“... to work, they soon ground the life out of poetry: only the sturdier weed of propaganda was left. Peter Vansittart’s engrossing anthology, Voices from the Great War, brings out the ideological weakness and confusion that prevailed in the war, especially at the start. For some, the war gave proof of a long and deep sickness in European culture; for ...”

“... the reader, of telling him to take his vulgar curiosity elsewhere. ‘Loose ends can stimulate,’ Peter Vansittart says in an introduction to the Virago edition of one of Bedford’s earlier novels, ‘and paying the readers the compliment of assuming they possess imagination, she creates gaps for that imagination to fill.’ But gaps that are artful in ...”

“... scale, intolerable … interested only in himself and women’ (some of which, as his friend Peter Vansittart said afterwards, neatly fitted Ayer himself). He continued to wear pyjamas under his clothes, the cord sometimes trailing from the bottom of his trousers. Flatly refusing to touch Chinese food, he lived on boiled eggs and toast, sometimes ...”

“... itself an event – even without the BBC’s extraordinary graphics and the mobile enthusiasm of Peter Snow.’ Now, it’s not especially surprising that the deputy leader of a historic social-democratic party should open an article with a sentence that reads as if hastily translated from the Albanian, or that he should close that article without a single ...”

“... categorically states that Wallis was responsible for this breach of security.’ Of Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office and head of British Intelligence, Higham writes (and here he does provide the evidence): he ‘was Wallis’s implacable enemy from the day he was convinced she was a Nazi collaborator’. It is ...”

“... would be ‘sufficient to set down with myself and also to serve my friends’, but George Vansittart advised his nephew to get £60,000. The impeachment in 1787 of the former governor-general, Warren Hastings, was intended to expose government malpractice in India, but it lasted eight years and ended in his acquittal.Knights’s achievement is to set ...”