“... James does this particularly well with the coastal landscape of Suffolk around Aldeburgh – Peter Grimes country. Then it is time for the ‘nicely managed crescendo’. And then it is time for bed. No doubt it is partly because of the proximity of bed (it is from his own bedroom that he has emerged with his spidery manuscript and the single candle) and ...”

“... and perhaps novel about Rupert is that he has no respect at all. Take the case of Lorraine and Peter Landau, a couple in Northwood, who took time from what one presumes was a busy schedule to write to Rupert, having seen him in The Vortex, to comment on ‘the audibility of my performance in rather pompous terms’. Rupert opened the letter while ‘deeply ...”

“... take confirmation in it from the other books under review. Charles Tomlinson’s Annunciations and Peter Porter’s Possible Worlds share Renaissance Virgins for cover illustrations. Tomlinson’s is Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, in which the angel has just leapt spectacularly over the balcony, terrifying the cat, to make his declaration to an overcome and ...”

“... left-wing and tackled such subjects as the condition of Spanish women, sexual repression and gay love that excited audiences in his day and guarantee his interest for modern-day theorists. Nature favoured Lorca’s later reputation in other ways. He was endowed with a flirtatious, rather attractive homosexuality which, considering the time and the ...”

“... of the Enlightenment dominated historical writing as late as the 1960s, and is best represented by Peter Gay’s two magisterial volumes published in 1966 and 1969. After Gay and Cassirer, two trends dominated Enlightenment history until Israel came on the scene. One situated the Enlightenment in a particular national ...”

“... meeting her composed some doggerel beginning: And yet just now a Utrecht lady’s charms Make my gay bosom beat with love’s alarms. Who could have thought to see young Cupid fly Through Belgia’s thick and suffocating sky? Boswell went so far as to write to Rousseau, asking his advice on a possible marriage to Belle, but the sage did not reply. Boswell ...”

“... government, contemporary language into its services, the social gospel into its spiritual message. Peter Simple’s immortal creation, Dr Spacely-Trellis, the ‘go-ahead’ Bishop of Bevindon, personified the popular conception of the modern church leader – until real life played an unfair trick and produced Dr John Spong, the ultra-trendy Bishop of ...”

“... until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. A collection of fugitive pieces, Carnival, Hysteria and Writing, will be published by Oxford next year with an introduction by Stuart Hall, with whom Allon studied at the Birmingham Centre for ...”

“... and consultancies, or the media circuit might beckon. Such soft landings aren’t available to Peter Mandelson, whose long-deserved fall is finally absolute. Mandelson was fired as ambassador to the United States in September, after the release of an initial tranche of files relating to the sex criminal and financier Jeffrey Epstein. These files ...”

“... explanation could there be? Unfortunately, however, it is not true. Max, it appears, was neither gay nor Jewish. He might have been, and been just the same sort of chap, but as it happens he wasn’t. Biographers want to explain things too – often by an unconscious wish to identify themselves with their subjects. I have something in common with Joyce, and ...”

“... also described himself flirting with Blair. Some men have that effect on other men; it’s not a gay thing exactly, but it’s not the opposite of a gay thing, and there is something faintly homoerotic about the governmental milieu described here, full of dark-haired men shouting at each other, TB and AC and PM and GB all ...”

“... And being fair to Murdoch is quite hard at the moment. She has received a sympathetic biography by Peter Conradi, which may be too kind to her, and a sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she ...”

“... nowhere, but emerged in very specific economic conditions. Russell’s friend and fellow musician Peter Gordon recalls the mutual support that sustained their circle of friends in late-1970s New York: ‘We used to joke that the same $50 got passed back and forth between us. There was no dividing line between money and the community.’ New York had a ...”

“... the school in Dulwich that her father attended. Although not an amateur like Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey or Allingham’s Albert Campion, Inspector Alleyn is quietly well-connected, a younger son who went to Eton and Oxford and then entered the diplomatic service, but left because he couldn’t stick the terms of the Paris Peace Conference; his concern ...”

“... Iread​ Peter Biskind’s book about the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, long ago. Apart from scraps of celebrity anecdote, what I remember of it now is something more diffuse, a mood associated with the mysterious figures of the producers: an impression of flared trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born ...”