“... prominent in the Soviet Union. In the late 1950s and 1960s, most members of the intelligentsia read reform-oriented journals such as Novy Mir, which lobbied political leaders for support in its constant struggle with the state censors to get works like Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich into print. Novy Mir’s editors described ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in the hospital for many years. He was incontinent and unable to speak clearly. He drew ...”

“... yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written.Eliot’s considerable correspondence with ...”

“... and Todorov himself. A substantive collection that is not similarly guilty of sexism is Peter Caws’s issue of Social Research entitled ‘Current French Philosophy’.* In addition to exemplary essays such as Sarah Kofman’s on Kant and respect for women, it contains a representative deconstruction by Derrida of the philosophical notion of ...”

“... might at least have mentioned Sartre’s Mod-like appetite for amphetamines; if ever a novel read like one long comedown from a teeth-grinding high, it’s Nausea.) Further down the road, Mod became more about buying the right records and wearing the approved uniform, but in the nervy modernist dawn there was a real hunger for films, books, dialogue; or ...”

“... his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far ...”

“... abstraction. It slots him into a ‘cookie-cutter modernist narrative of marching styles’, as Peter Schjeldahl put it. But the appearance of relentless progress in Mondrian’s art sometimes disguised uncertain forward leaps and backtrackings, like the careful deletions and proof marks he made on the letters he wrote in English. His reinventions involved ...”

“... to acknowledge as indispensable two particular books about Caravaggio (by Andrew Graham-Dixon and Peter Robb) from which he has drawn an enormous amount.Sudden Death is full of asides: ‘As I write, I don’t know what this book is about. It’s not exactly about a tennis match … Maybe it’s just a book about how to write this book; maybe that’s what ...”