“... became a schoolmaster in Kent, and his son became a headmaster in Essex, and his son, my father, Peter Bunting, fought with distinction, while only a very young man, in the Second World War, and after it was over went up to Brasenose College, Oxford – the first time a Bunting had been so elevated, and unfortunately the last, since I was a student only at ...”

“... thing about Forster, given the resolutely minor, even footling tenor of his ways – how he rose to challenges such as Lawrence. His career up to the Twenties is exhilarating for Forster’s responsiveness to what he encountered: his response to Cambridge in a time of greatness, his response to the otherness of Italy, and even more to the beauty and ...”

“... in his studio and in the street; timber-framed buildings in old Berlin and in the new Berlin which rose during Menzel’s lifetime. One sees a whole courtyard of students at their easels painting a mounted cavalryman, and models queuing for work at the Academy. There is also a photograph showing Menzel’s state funeral: the hearse drawn by black-plumed ...”

“... before finding a marketable new drug. The average research and development costs of a new drug rose fivefold in real terms between 1960 and 1975 and now stand at over £50m. This means that only the largest firms can afford them, and then only if they are confident of mass sales. The recently introduced techniques of genetic manipulation may lead to a ...”

“... to turn round and tell you it isn’t? This test is, however, triumphantly passed by Ann Barr, Peter York and the intrepid and diligent team of assistant fieldworkers with whom they have penetrated far and deep into the rose-red canyons of SW3, 1, 7, 10, 6 and 5 – correctly ranked in that order – and the near- and ...”

“... May 1982, even if their owner Rupert Murdoch so wished – which he emphatically doesn’t. Peter Riddell of the Financial Times has taken an educated interest, but he is also in the House of Commons Lobby, and you cannot expect Lobby journalists to allow themselves to be perceived as part of a campaign. Paul Foot of the Mirror writes as pungently as ...”

“... witness reports by football club members:Each time a boy fell on the floor he was kicked until he rose. The more they begged for mercy, the more the assaults intensified. Eventually Stompie fell unconscious. Someone poured water over him and [one of the persecutors] told Winnie that things had gone too far. She took no notice and began whipping Stompie yet ...”

“... no surprise that the co-editors of The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom, Peter Cane and Harshan Kumarasingham, are an academic lawyer and a political scientist. Nevertheless they steer away from stale orthodoxies and insular complacency, interrogating instead Whig assumptions about English exceptionalism. Tamar Herzog questions the ...”

“... not one ‘medieval mind’ but many – those for and against the eroticism of The Romance of the Rose, for instance, or the learned and unlearned (different degrees of learning gave people quite different degrees of scientific knowledge). It was the dialectic between these different medieval minds that brought about change. That is another ...”

“... it made Self momentarily speechless. ‘Belly of an architect,’ he said, using the title of the Peter Greenaway movie to express his amazement. ‘A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the Western eye,’ Joan Didion said. She was writing about California, where pools, in her view, were less a symbol of ...”

“... to Nicholas de Grouchy, the editor of Aristotle, Elie Vinet the mathematician and cosmographer, Peter Ramus, Henri Estienne, his collaborator and printer in a variety of works, and to Julius Caesar Scaliger, who held him in high regard. As these connections suggest, although his associates in these years were Catholic, ‘the evidence,’ in McFarlane’s ...”

“... graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill’s the place I may well rest if there’s a spot under the rose roots and the daffodils by which dad dignified the family plot. If buried ashes saw then I’d survey the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek, and left, the ground where Leeds United play but disappoint their fans week after week, which makes them lose ...”

“... is no special cello in Lasker-Wallfisch’s story. (Born Lasker, she married the pianist Peter Wallfisch after she emigrated to Britain; they helped found the English Chamber Orchestra.) Kennedy offered to try to track down the one she lost in the Holocaust, but she wasn’t interested: ‘It was a different life.’ (That cello was a not-so-distant ...”

“... part in it. Then Douglas Carswell, the Tory backwoodsman who has tabled a motion of no confidence, rose and demanded that time be made available for a debate. ‘It’s not a substantive motion,’ the Speaker replied. ‘Oh yes it is,’ came voices from all sides. Extraordinary. I’ve never seen the Speaker heckled before. It was like watching Ceausescu’s ...”

“... ale. I fell in with his plan. I had met the International Socialists. My new chum was called Peter Sedgwick, and he didn’t really wear the aspect of the recruiter. Well-known for his edition of Victor Serge, he was soon to become better known for his clinical evisceration of the work of R.D. Laing, and for his hilariously mordant critique of Herbert ...”