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“... 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 ...”

“... neither of them really unexpected after years of frailty, but both, Doris Lessing and her son, Peter, having attachments of some complexity to each other, to my daughter and to me, going back even before I went at 15 to live in their house. When she died last November at the age of 94, I’d known Doris for fifty years. In all that time, I’ve never ...”

“... postwar history to isolate a series of decisive incidents, both familiar and sombre: the Notting Hill Riots of 1958; Tory candidate Peter Griffiths winning Smethwick six years later with the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’; Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in 1968; the New Cross fire of ...”

“... who carry pieces of the city to build barricades are ants carrying leaves and twigs to build their hill. The kitchen boys and girls who make thousands of sandwiches for the Maidanistas are bees making honey. The Berkut swarming into frame before they open fire look like locusts. When protesters die the camera doesn’t zoom in on their agony: it’s like ...”

“... European values.’ The next morning I was back in London, walking my six-year-old twins up the hill to school. They were born during the decade I spent in Moscow after leaving university, trying to work out what being Russian meant. The twins are ‘slow to speech’ and their English and Russian are both bad. They communicate with each other in some ...”

“... poem. If these are dodged, a totalising vision and vocabulary may take over. Like Hughes, Peter Redgrove has developed a brand of ready-mix poetic utterance. Poems 1954-1987, now out in paperback, leaves a homogenised taste of apples, dew, leaves, clouds, mists, spiders, ‘juices and saps’. However, it accords with Redgrove’s ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel is partly a narrative, partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors. It is an important and a depressing book, its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel ...”

“... all that was left of the old neighbourhood was a chemical factory. One of his mates at school was Peter Hook, who ended up playing bass in the band; Hook likes to describe himself as an ‘oik’. Curtis was more bookish, and isolated. Joy Division’s music was bleak, full of frustration, fear and guilt. They were produced by Martin Hannett, whose studio ...”

“... in his chin; ‘one bandy-legged old French officer, wearing Hessian boots, who was getting up the hill with difficulty, taking hold of bushes’. These details are more memorable than the names of the battles in which they occur. All the same, it is difficult to resist the appeal of striking subject-matter. In ‘The Music of Poetry’, Eliot remarked: ‘the ...”

“... could have been dwelt on and evoked more intimately. At this stage the quest must either peak or peter out. The ideas and sensations inherent in the three-month trek are about to concentrate in an intense point. Fiennes walks up a granite hill to an inuksuk, an Inuit landmark made of piled stones. The only one I have seen ...”

“... sir, are a drunkard, and some of you are whoremasters’ (he’s looking at Henry Marten and Sir Peter Wentworth). Then he points to the Speaker up in his chair: ‘Fetch him down.’ When the Speaker doesn’t budge, he shouts, ‘Put him out,’ and a couple of members, rather unwillingly, drag him down, and he is marched out without the mace through a ...”

“... mettle in the towns, where they could prepare for government once the Red Army had come through. Peter Conradi handles this material extremely well, and draws on E.P. Thompson’s lectures in Stanford in 1981 about his brother, later collated by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, as Beyond the Frontier. E.P. is more committed than Conradi to the idea that Frank ...”

“... the curved ‘exedra’ is a locked gate – beyond lies a tunnel which pierces clean through the hill and through which I once slightly nervously walked, heading for a minuscule pinpoint of light, thick sand underfoot, spalled off the walls and roof over the years. Evelyn told Aubrey that this was his Posillipo, the 600-metre road tunnel which linked ...”

“... Millennium Experience, set ablaze. Flames visible across the river from Beckton Alp to Parliament Hill. ‘A man said to have a slight Irish accent said: “This is the IRA. We have planted bombs at the southern entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel. For goodness sake, do something about it. We want the area cleared.”’ So Gareth Parry reported in the Guardian ...”

“... post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or just in some baffling way French. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a ‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really struck me was that every woman I knew who had ...”