“... second-hand bookshops than in the hands of a new generation of readers). It’s a rule of thumb in reading – or weighing – politicians’ memoirs to infer some correlation between their length and the strength of the ghostly influences pervading them. This applies to Churchill, of course, who was shameless in his exploitation of ghost-writers; but even ...”

“... of poems in which the reader finds certain emotions being dissected, emotions she may feel while reading. ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ starts as a painful memory of his dad’s attempt to buy an expensive needle ‘for our ancient, beat-up Philips turntable’, which made the salesman splutter at their pretension: ‘still smirking, he sent us from the ...”

“... to, say, a patch of pink paint and, at the same time, to the Virgin’s cheek? It helps, in reading Baxandall’s book, to be aware of the extent to which his examples from computer and cognitive science, as well as from the words and work of painters, help to define a central paradox: that if we pay close attention to variables like shadows, which ...”

“... the aspect of his work that W.H. Auden chose to commemorate in a genial poem. What interests the reading public is the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Practitioners of Tolkien’s academic subject often deplore this fact, but posterity’s judgment does him no great injustice. The energies devoted to Tolkien’s fiction were often denied to ...”

“... that ‘a journey across west central and east central England by major road is best occupied reading proofs.’ So that’s how the book came into my hands within a week of polling day! If it’s more of a diary than a work of retrospective lucubration, it’s none the worse for that. This wasn’t the election for pundits to be wise after the ...”

“... was not shelves of books, but a handful of books, that the truly serious student was committed to reading. Culling the literary herd of its old, weak and marginal members was an exercise likely to find favour in the Thirties, a relatively guiltless fantasy in the decade of Hitler and Stalin. But it also happened to meet the needs of culture’s clients far ...”

“... Backward-ranging comparisons, and a risk of anachronism, are likely to enter into an experience of Peter Taylor’s fine stories, for his is an art which makes much of the existence of traditions, and of a deep past. At all events, it seems clear that the stories exhibit Austen’s dedication to a class, and that the class he is concerned with carries points ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter Porter. He was an Australian immigrant in London, and had written a lot of poems, but published relatively few; she was a nurse who seemed ‘very English’ in accent and tastes, and was admired for having a figure like a ballet dancer. They set up home ...”

“... out all too clearly the unevenness of his character and achievement. It is tactfully introduced by Peter Quennell, a friend described by Pope-Hennessy elsewhere in the volume as ‘amiable as always, but fundamentally antipathetic’. Mr Quennell does not disguise the less agreeable side of his friend’s life, but prefers to leave it to the letters to reveal ...”

“... When I started reading Bliss I hadn’t read Mr Carey’s first book, The Fat Man in History, though like everybody else I had heard the stories acclaimed in terms which made the prospect of his first novel very attractive. It is therefore both surprising and regrettable that I have to say that Bliss is a bad novel, though by a talented author ...”

“... Kiev princes to Politburo rule, from the atrocities of the forced Europeanisation introduced by Peter the Great to Stalin’s Sovietisation, and from the Polish invasion of Moscow in the early 17th century to Moscow’s imposition of martial law on Poland in 1980, the so-called Russian soul has swung between enlightenment and barbarism, humanism and ...”

“... of Oxbridge voices reviewing an exhibition selected by and posthumously mounted as a tribute to Peter Fuller. The wannabe Oxbridge voice of Giles Auty, art bumbler for the Spectator, declares ‘Peter’ was led by his arguments rather than his eyes. Up speaks real Oxbridge voice, while duly patronising to Auty – not ...”

“... In his book about religion, Peter Hitchens has a lot more to say about his brother Christopher than Christopher has to say about Peter in his book about himself.* ‘Some brothers get on,’ Peter writes mournfully, ‘some do not. We were the sort that just didn’t ...”

“... zombies of the welfare state’, and its knack of dividing and neutralising the opposition. Peter Hall is part of the opposition that has been neutralised. His kind of planning was, of course, never the same as Ruth Glass’s in the first place. Cities of Tomorrow is chiefly an account of what planners have thought and have done, since the late 19th ...”