“... to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign Office in the Falklands had tried to do’. But unlike Pym, Walker kept his job, because she didn’t dare sack him. In some respects her role in the miners’ strike ...”

“... good to eat.’ Packets of biscuits were lying there and a giant heap of broccoli. Martin read out some of the labels: ‘Chicken and stuffing. Yorkshire pudding. Cashew nuts. Bananas. Three chicken pies. Yesterday.’ The lady in the claret hat came up to the door of the van to ask if we had any butter or bread. ‘Mince?’ asked ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... both right in itself and in their interest, a self-consciously centrist political leader tends to read the present disposition of political conviction (or prejudice or apathy) as a given, positioning himself at the midpoint of that imagined spectrum. In place of a political philosophy, a centre party of this kind relies on the psephological equivalent of a ...”

“... songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall be truly known; and those about herFrom her shall read the perfect ways of honour,And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.It isn’t clear that these lines were intended as a wholehearted endorsement of nostalgia for the old queen and her times. Only a decade after her funeral, there may have been as ...”

“... surprised to find that this was one of the points Hans was to make in his 75th-birthday tribute to Peter Pears, published in 1985. His salute opened with one of those magisterial rebukes, ‘Every musician knows that normally singers are amongst the most unmusicianly, if not indeed unmusical, members of our profession,’ but went on to praise Pears (as ...”

“... inspector who struck him in a wholly unsuccessful attempt to extract a confession from him. As I read the minority’s dissent, the Court of Appeal would, if satisfied that this incident had taken place, be bound to set him free. But I have to say that to me this is taking the ideology of due process too far. If that is the, or a, conclusion entailed by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... while Faith, his 1987 solo album, is punctuated with Prince-like grunts and coos, Michael still read to the public as a classic ladies’ man. The video for the first single from the album, ‘I Want Your Sex’ (a virtual clone of Prince’s ‘Kiss’), was controversial enough to earn a BBC pre-watershed ban. ‘Sex was now synonymous with sickness and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”