“... if she didn’t seem to have been perfectly content with her existence. In his biography of Freud, Peter Gay quotes Martha’s reply to a letter of condolence after Freud’s death that it was ‘a feeble consolation that in the 53 years of our marriage there was not a single angry word between us, and that I always tried as much as possible to remove the ...”

“... days, having run away from the domestic constrictions of Portsmouth, she had worked as a clerk at Peter Jones, then in the firm’s furniture-painting studio, then as a secretary at the Medici Society, then for MGM as a reader. She used this period, the mid-1930s, as material for the best of her novels outside the trilogies, The Doves of Venus ...”

“... a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War ...”

“... or abandoned to bewail their fate on a stage constructed out of gallstones and other body casts. Peter the Great bought the lot for the huge sum of 30,000 Dutch guilders in 1717, and had them shipped to Russia. Both Fragonard and Ruysch were decidedly odd characters, brooders who took their discipline to a pitch well beyond the necessary degree of scientific ...”

“... the audience could boo) to the introduction of the authorial programme note and press interview (read in respectful silence). The greatest change of the Eighties and Nineties in the theatre – as in British culture as a whole – has been a shift of power from the producer to the consumer: it’s no surprise that audiences have flocked back to a playwright ...”

“... Even a truly vile and racist humiliator of women is ‘more sad than bad’. Wendy, meet Peter. One reason we can accept Kate’s disillusion with her work is the poignancy of her daughter’s need for her. (‘This is my mummy. Isn’t she lovely and tall?’ Emily says proudly when Kate comes with her to school.) Another is that her job is ...”

“... continues. Of course, some people, notably Chechens, will tell you that the war really began with Peter the Great’s 1722 southward advance into the Caucasus, or even with Ivan the Terrible’s 1559 building of the Tarki fort on the nearby Sunzha River, and that the conflict has continued ever since through inter-generational rebellions, deportations and ...”

“... has been split in two and the sections carved in the wrong order by someone unaware that Hebrew is read from right to left). The monument portrays the Hungarian nation, represented by an angelic figure, as the hapless ‘victim’ of Nazi violence. In fact, Hungary was one of the chief beneficiaries of Axis policy. Under the First Vienna Award of 1938, Germany ...”

“... Under the circumstances, he told Edward Marsh, the poet’s literary executor, he had read Brooke’s war sonnets ‘with an emotion that somehow precludes the critical measure’. Eddie Marsh, too, was greatly struck by Rupert’s ‘radiant, youthful figure’, which he first saw in a student play in 1906: ‘After 11 years,’ he wrote, ‘the ...”

“... Viking era was nearly over. The section on ‘Belief and Ritual’ is fascinating. Anyone who has read A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok (2011), or Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen (1960), or even followed the Marvel Comics series Thor, will already know about Odin and Loki, fire giants, frost giants and the Midgard Serpent. But it’s astonishing how ...”

“... in which print triumphs over scribal culture have been eclipsed by a recognition of their overlap; Peter Stallybrass’s work on ‘printing-for-manuscript’ shows how popular printed texts such as almanacs actively encouraged handwritten interventions: one from 1566 offers itself as a space for anyone ‘that will make & keepe notes of any actes, deedes, or ...”

“... not much has changed since Alison Smithson’s day. The chapter on Smithson, who with her husband, Peter, achieved a reputation out of all proportion to the number of buildings they put up, is one of Cooke’s best. Born in 1928, Smithson is among the youngest of the women she considers. A contemporary of Margaret Thatcher, Smithson, like Thatcher, made her ...”

“... leaving her in imminent danger of being convicted of poisoning her worthless ex-lover. Lord Peter Wimsey, whimsically love-struck and coming to the rescue, confronts the real villain: Yes, well, about this arsenic. As you know, it’s not good for people in a general way, but there are some people – those tiresome peasants in Styria one hears so much ...”

“... visit, during a tour in crippling heat of the ruined fortifications constructed around the port by Peter the Great, Wilhelm again forgot his instructions and buttonholed the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, on one of his latest hobby-horses, the need to establish a pan-European oil trust to compete with American Standard Oil. The ...”

“... the new queen was attempting to draw together in a letter home asking Queen Mary if she has read Mein Kampf, ‘very soap-box, but very interesting’. When war came she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt with the combination of warmth, spontaneity and calculated effect she had now honed to precision. The letter emphasised Britain’s resilience while welcoming ...”