“... of modernity, it becomes ‘an act of continuation that is also a meditation on continuity’, as Peter Conrad put it. Thomas Colpeper, the eccentric magistrate, desperately wants the soldiers stationed nearby to share his sense of historical continuity. But they aren’t interested, and his misogyny alienates potentially sympathetic newcomers such as ...”

“... slow to learn the new language, were something for Sundays or, in 1793-94, for Décadis. Colin Jones shows how the noble intention of the revolutionaries to substitute a national policy of bienfaisance for the erratic charity of the Ancien Régime fell victim to the consequences of expropriating the Church and the insatiable demands of total war. This ...”

“... possible to write poems.’ Richler includes some grimly beautiful counter-examples, among them Peter Porter’s ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’, a poem which incorporates Adorno’s point:                     Such death, says the painter, is worthwhile – it makes a colour never known. It makes a sight that’s unimagined, says the ...”

“... there is a better reason for not having a ballot, one which Scargill and the NUM general secretary Peter Heathfield (especially the latter) used constantly, but which is not to be found in these two books. It is the differential problem: that a ballot on an issue which affects all miners equally is a reasonable proposition, while a ballot which affects ...”

“... longer before I die – I fall to brooding about that devastating term of abuse of our times, the Peter Pan crow of complacency: Get a life. I am impressed and rather envious of those who use the phrase: that they can be so certain that they know what a life is, and so convinced that they have one. From the note of disdain with which the phrase is spoken, it ...”

“... where else do you get a name like that?’ To us cocky British snobs who call the great man ‘Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ and don’t much mind what he called himself, the ‘mistake’ of the tourists is not tragical. But, for William Gaddis, this sort of ignorance leads up to the climax of The Recognitions, where his most admirable character – Stanley, the ...”

“... short of his own standards’) than the translation of the Lives by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella that I’ve just quoted from. Perspectives (the French title has brackets around the final, unpronounced ‘s’) is an epistolary novel, with twenty correspondents: more than twice as many as in Les Liaisons dangereuses and almost as many as in ...”

“... Paxman), the Falklands War, Neil Kinnock, the Hitler Diaries and Bernard Ingham. A good friend of Peter Mandelson’s, he has long been close to the inner circles of New Labour. As well as there having been no pesky research to slow down the writing of the novel, there was also a strong imperative to publish it as soon as possible: Tony Blair’s topicality ...”

“... could not bring himself to mention the actual occupation of so undignified a member of society. As Peter Burke points out in a friendly but sceptical contribution to People’s History and Socialist Theory, under such circumstances ‘people’s history’ was a contradiction in terms. We are a long way from Tacitus, upon whom time has taken its revenge by ...”

“... and riddles. Her mother, Marie Hansen, had immigrated to the US in the 1880s, and her father, Peter Walker, whom she never knew, was born in the Danish West Indies (after 1917, the US-controlled Virgin Islands). The little that is known about him suggests that he was half-Danish. By any logical account, Nella Larsen was a Danish American. After the death ...”

“... Ireland Secretary after a mass break-out of Republican prisoners from the Maze prison, and Peter Brooke failed in a more recent attempt to leave the same office after he had sung a song on a television chat show in the Republic of Ireland, hours after seven people had been killed in a particularly bad atrocity in the Province. While ministers have been ...”

“... church of St Mary Magdalene, Munster Square, whose current priest is the Reverend Mother Sally ...”

“... writer bristling with contexts. Prynne is mentioned as an enabling presence in Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain’s anthology, Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970, which attempts to reveal to Britain and Ireland a poetic culture it has set to one side. The book contains more than fifty poets, no two of whom are remotely similar, and no more that a ...”

“... but of De Sica’s wonderful Stazione Termini, also known as Indiscretion (1953), with Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift, where another American woman has an Italian romance and leaves it behind. But De Sica is tender where Lean is austere, even though Lean did later say he had put more of himself in Summertime than any other film he had ever made. Brief ...”

“... six months after the outbreak of the First World War, on Christmas Day 1914, Freud wrote to Ernest Jones to lament that the psychoanalytic movement ‘is now perishing in the strife of nations’ (the two men were on opposite sides in the war). ‘I do not delude myself,’ he wrote. ‘The springtime of our science has abruptly broken off … all we can do is ...”