“... them difficult to spot from the air.This slow progress allowed my father, Territorial Army Captain Peter Raban of (to give his full address) ‘A’ Troop, 265 Battery, 67th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, to spend much of 21 January putting the finishing touches to an unusually long and well-thought-out letter to my mother, which reads as if he put it ...”

“... and of the Folio press. His anthology A Salt Reader (1995) gives space to poets as diverse as Peter Porter, Lyn Hejinian and Yannis Ritsos. In 1997 he published a novel, Genre; his play, Crop Circles, will by performed this month by the Marlowe Society in Cam bridge. There are 12 books of poetry to date. Kinsella established a reputation with his first ...”

“... to finish. ‘Why have so many of Britain’s great cities fared so badly in the 20th century?’ Peter Clark, the general editor of the series, asks in his preface. Turn the page, and Martin Daunton’s introduction descends with unconcealed relish into the ‘decay, corruption, stench and stickiness’ of the early ...”

“... from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown … in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression – all these had existed, did ...”

“... of the announcement: ‘I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.’ For the older generation, Princess Margaret was the unlucky princess. She was our Diana: capricious, passionate, vindictive, doomed to fall in love with rotters, the breakaway royal who hung out with actors and rogues and who was frozen out by ...”

“... Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a heart attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal ...”

“... a rebel against the state. The film begins with the public funeral and official mourning of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, president of both the German Employers’ Association and the Federation of German Industry, who was held hostage and then executed by the Red Army Faction in response to the deaths of the prisoners in Stammheim. It ends with the public funeral ...”

“... party or continue as a front for the IRA. Ignoring renewed protestations from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness that Sinn Fein is separate from the IRA, that it is a political party with a democratic mandate from its voters, most politicians and observers have, like Major himself, accepted almost without question the Unionist formulation: Sinn ...”

“... pile-up of this magnitude, however much he/we might wish to hail the editorial labours of Peter Davison and his assistants. Davison has been working on this edition for almost twenty years and, as he has not been slow to tell us, has had to overcome a succession of irritating setbacks – mostly to do with the shoddiness and indecisiveness of ...”

“... outside the restriction of their lives and are lost to themselves. Slouching towards Kalamazoo by Peter De Vries, is about sexual liberation and the 19th century’s heritage: its first half jokily replays the situation of The Scarlet Letter in a small Mid-Western town in the late 1950s. The narrator is Tony Thrasher, the precociously witty and allusive son ...”

“... on professionals the need to keep on working at the meaning of the text. John Blair and G.H. Martin scan the text for evidence of the state of Secular Minster Churches and Borough towns respectively. Howard Clarke, on the Domesday ‘satellites’, follows up Galbraith and presents a concise list of the MSS which contain the texts of the Domesday Book ...”

“... and his own guilt-stained history with Alma. Desmond, Laura’s second husband, and Peter, the editor who both loves and is terrorised by his favourite writer, maintain an uneasy comradeship. Once again we are inside a social world on the brink of disintegration. This time, though, Fox seems far more sanguine about the splintering. Laura may be ...”

“... insecurity and make clear the precariousness of their position on what its current first minister, Peter Robinson of Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, once described as ‘the window ledge of the Union’. A colonial strangeness lurks behind such seemingly familiar phenomena as student drunkenness. Belfast’s Holy Land is an area between Queen’s ...”

“... norm during life. Failing that, writers might agitate for pre-publication advances closer to the Martin Amis mark, though I doubt that they’d get them. On the face of it, a greater stress on ‘moral rights’ is not necessarily a bad thing. What, in practical terms, it means is that an author can still object to mistreatment of what remains ‘his’ work ...”

“... fretfully whether we really need to know this much about Betjeman. Hillier acknowledges what, if Martin Gilbert had been a shade less thorough, might be a record number of helpers and informants. Flagging only in the last stretch of the alphabet, they range from Sir Harold Acton to Douglas Woodruff, and like his subject the author has evidently ‘made it ...”