“... plausibly recalled than the conger eel story is the fine remark made by Shelley’s friend Jane Williams when Trelawny first encountered him. No sooner had they met than Shelley disappeared, and a puzzled Trelawny asked where on earth he had gone. ‘Mrs Williams said: “Who? Shelley? Oh, he comes and goes like a ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... with the tank. Among them we find not only Fuller, the Crowleyite and Mosleyite, but also Clough Williams-Ellis, one of the group at Bermicourt, now best known for the village of Portmeirion, which he designed and assembled – a bizarre bricolage of architectural styles and elements. Another was Wilfred Bion, whose War Memoirs are filled with sketch-maps ...”

“... has been the focus of attention for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a ...”

“... drag, both of Willie’s Cumberland balls are on pawn in her handbag, and as for your boss little Peter, he’s rushing off to kiss the great Nigerian arse.’ The real problem for a novelist comes with the cast of living public figures firmly under the protection of the English libel law. Clearly, to write a documentary novel about the British Left and its ...”

“... she admired Britten, who set some of her poems, and in the days of their widowhood grew close to Peter Pears. She knew Vaughan Williams (detecting a physical resemblance to T.F. Powys, also to Arthur Machen) and records a significant conversation she had with him while his wife and Gerald Finzi’s were buying things in ...”

“... behind whose mass they can emerge periodically to throw out a sharp non-interpretative idea: Berna Williams on Descartes, Crispin Wright on Wittgenstein; before either of them, P.F. Strawson on Kant. Dummett is not the first to see Frege’s suitability for this role: twenty years ago, in Three Philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe and ...”

“... with the ‘virtue’ morality of an Aristotle or Marx. Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Williams have both famously contrasted the two lineages, and for rather different reasons shown Kantian morality the door. The Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio is somewhat more prudent. In these essays on ethics and politics, he regards the two ...”

“... or restored to remove scratches. But it never puts colour back into the cheeks of the dead: Peter Jackson’s dazzling transformation of the monochrome archive in They Shall Not Grow Old could not be further from Akomfrah’s mind. His actors warn us that remembrance comes in many guises, some of them unreliable. (He hints, too, at the allure of parade ...”

“... Gold Cup and the Grand National in the space of two years. By then, women trainers such as Venetia Williams and Henrietta Knight were as successful as the men; Jenny Pitman had two Gold Cup winners and two Grand National winners. In the early days, a woman had to train with her husband’s name on the licence, although there are records of widows being granted ...”

“... was carried to the Treasurership – a crucial step towards the Leadership. We know from Philip Williams’s biography that he in turn was prepared to do the ‘dirty work’ of his Deakinite backers, notably in the exceedingly illiberal attempt to expel Bevan from the Party in 1955. Crossman warned Gaitskell at this time ‘that he seemed to be playing the ...”

“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the ...”

“... him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ‘dinosaur’ if they came from a Peter Taaffe or Alan Woods, but he is inoculated against such criticism by his youth and avoidance of jargon. In many respects, he is the best thing to happen to the non-compromised, non-New Labour left in the mainstream media in decades: he makes ideas that are ...”

“... of Shakespeare, Leavis was supremely uninterested in the theatre, yet the theatre directors Peter Wood and Trevor Nunn (in the same year as Ellis) were his students, and others like Peter Hall went to his seminars and admired him. Above all his influence was exercised via the students who became teachers, mostly in ...”

“... research Claire Tomalin draws – concludes that Dickens visited Nelly for elocution lessons. Peter Ackroyd has put an only slightly less pure interpretation on the connection: Dickens and Nelly enjoyed (or suffered) a ‘sexless’ marriage, in which she played out the part of the idealised virgin bride. An opposite line which traces itself back to ...”