“... humble/devoted/faithful servant’ – these terms are fossils of what the historian Peter Laslett called ‘the world we have lost’, a world in which virtually all social relations, no matter how intimate, were defined by the language and ideology of service.To sense how this was so, we have only to look at the literature of the early modern ...”

“... have known of later privatisations in Pinochet’s Chile. Until Bel’s recent research it was Peter Drucker, in his writings about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the ...”

“... painting which was once though to depict ‘The Clothing of the Naked’ or an angel liberating St Peter from prison, but in 1935 was shown to represent ‘Job Visited by his Wife’. He points out how, as soon as this identification had been made, people began – almost as by a gestalt transformation – to read the ...”

“... picture; in some ways it reinforces it. Thompson’s second target is more consequential. It was Peter Laslett, adopting the techniques of the French historical demographers to the records of obscure English villages of the 17th century, who in 1963 first established what seemed to be the surprising modernity of English village life, at least with respect to ...”

“... of individual delegates is more important than the articles of the Geneva Conventions. Thus Peter Stocker, chief delegate to Somalia in 1991-92, acting in die tradition of Sidney Brown and Friedrich Born, was able to develop an enormous and innovative relief effort, the only one in the country at the time, after the UN and most of the private relief ...”

“... I had also heard of, and been suitably impressed by, his vacation job on the Times, and had read a devastating ‘Oxford Letter’ he had done for Granta, then Isis’s opposite number in Cambridge, which seemed to have been written by a world-weary cynic acquainted with every social and intellectual stratum of the university and city rather than a ...”

“... a little stiff and academic at times, but at his best still the Finest English translator I have read. I take it that his idea was to convey some element of general outlandishness while preserving a primary linguistic emphasis, something which A.T. Murray, the Loeb translator, whose function was to provide a no-frills prose version, achieved more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more eventful. Not only do I hardly drink and Rupert neither, but I don’t know anyone who does, Peter Cook about the only drunk I’ve ever known. In New York in the 1980s I used to like a screwdriver. Two was my limit, with three making me tipsy, which I found delightful. Had I been able to remain in that intermediate state I suppose I could have been a ...”

“... administration officials had floated similar ideas, FDR knew nothing of Kennedy’s plan until he read about it in the newspapers. He was not pleased. Meanwhile Rose was having the time of her life. She and her family were a tabloid sensation. Everyone was agog at her ‘marvellous figure’. She kept a ‘meticulous daily diary that reflected the essence of ...”

“... of photographers like Atget and Sander. In a rare essay on Lorck’s drawings from 1955, Peter Ward-Jackson noticed ‘the hallucinatory quality’ of his work, ‘the morbid trend of his imagination’ and ‘his predilection for the weird and the sinister’. Lorck practised bizarre conjunctions and often communicates a cold absorption in his ...”

“... the translator credited. Only the acknowledgment that the book was originally published in 1961 by Peter Owen allowed me to discover that the translator was A.E. Murch. The material reinstated by Einaudi in 1990 is not included; Taylor seems unaware of this. The new edition has few notes, no chronology and no index. This, together with frequent and sometimes ...”

“... for Labour: Alan Howarth and Shaun Woodward (both elected), and Alan Amos (ex-Hexham), who opposed Peter Lilley in Hitchin and Harpenden. The Liberal Democrats did well, but not uniformly. In addition to the two seats they lost, they came close to losing another five. They are still struggling to establish an absolutely secure base and are probably still ...”

“... that night told me that an officer in charge ‘said lock them in basically’. In a statement read out in court another DCO said he was ordered to ‘lock the detainees in the burning building’. Shaw expressed ‘incredulity’ that ‘no one has been able to say with absolute certainty how many detainees were present . . . or how many ...”

“... and perhaps novel about Rupert is that he has no respect at all. Take the case of Lorraine and Peter Landau, a couple in Northwood, who took time from what one presumes was a busy schedule to write to Rupert, having seen him in The Vortex, to comment on ‘the audibility of my performance in rather pompous terms’. Rupert opened the letter while ‘deeply ...”