“... Forty years ago​ , Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot, which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology, as it became known, spread swiftly to other disciplines: law, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology and so on. But a problem arose when it began to seep into the general culture – or, as Brooks puts it, into ‘the orbit of political cant and corporate branding ...”

“... Archigram was an out-of-hours architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the money, sometimes woeful, often funny, reliably coarse ...”

“... her only other acknowledgment is to the ‘values of character’ she finds in her husband, Frank. Then come ten pages of information about Objectivism, with bibliographies and a full-page advertisement – FIND or start a campus club near you ENTER essay contests on Ayn Rand’s novels – and an inside-back-page ad for yet another book. There are ...”

“... as far as it would go with Christopher and His Kind, a memoir of his prewar life – ‘as frank and factual as I can make it’ – and attained heroic stature among the newly militant gay community, particularly strong on the West Coast of America. In the Huntington’s otherwise extensive press release there was no reference to Isherwood’s being ...”

“... late 1940s the Utzons visited Greece and Morocco, drove a road-weary car around the US, visited Frank Lloyd Wright, Saarinen and Mies van der Rohe (who granted Utzon a minimalist interview, speaking, back turned, through a secretary) and then made for Mexico and the Aztec temples at Monte Alban in Oaxaca and Chichen Itza in Yucatan. These astonishing ruins ...”

“... has received more than €6 million in funding from Viktor Orbán’s government. A veteran of Frank Furedi’s Revolutionary Communist Party, Gilland is now a member of Reform. James Orr, a former City lawyer turned Cambridge theologian who has recently set up a pro-Reform think tank called the Centre for a Better Britain, has been a close friend of ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 and the early 1790s, prided itself on providing up-to-date information for the sporting gentlemen of London, including full details of starting prices and hot ...”

“... of Parnell and Casement. Clever readers of a certain type may object that Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield made rods for their own backs, dug their own graves, committed various sins of hubris and all the rest of it. Milne himself takes an honest and open line in favour of the NUM’s all-out strategy for the defence of the coalfields and the ...”

“... miserable days in the witness box, the Home Office scientist who had conducted the Griess test, Dr Frank Skuse, was obliged to revise his trial testimony again and again. He could produce no notes of the ingredients he had used in the tests after the men were arrested. In one case, he agreed he had made a miscalculation which left him with a figure a hundred ...”

“... attacks her failure to set up an inquiry into the behaviour of security officers who, according to Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, sought to undermine the Wilson premiership. These charges, as Mr Dalyell frames them, have either been denied or brushed aside by Mrs Thatcher or her spokesmen. The evidence on offer is sometimes thin. A not-proven verdict would seem ...”

“... which has tended to distract people from what the battle was about. It plays too large a part in Peter Watkins’s great pacifist film Culloden (1964), screened again by BBC2 for the anniversary. This showed how unworthily 1996 television treated the occasion: Scottish Television took refuge in song and the BBC dug up a ‘classic’ of 32 years ...”

“... adept at creating works of art out of his response to them, and one of the best features of Joseph Frank’s five-volume study is the erudition with which the background of current affairs and polemic is filled in. This concentration on local detail has the welcome effect of diminishing the rather melodramatic image of Dostoevsky which previous critics and ...”

“... Ovett style of things) as a ‘cabaret dancer’. Above all, Coe has been coached by his father, Peter, who has impressed himself on the public mind, rightly or wrongly, as a self-made authoritarian gifted with inflexible will, prescient ambition and a strikingly neo-Victorian belief in ‘scientific’ progress. It comes as no surprise to learn from the new ...”

“... for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series ...”