“... ale. I fell in with his plan. I had met the International Socialists. My new chum was called Peter Sedgwick, and he didn’t really wear the aspect of the recruiter. Well-known for his edition of Victor Serge, he was soon to become better known for his clinical evisceration of the work of R.D. Laing, and for his hilariously mordant critique of Herbert ...”

“... Peter Sedgwick has given us an informative, penetrating, witty and critical account of anti-psychiatry as represented by Laing, Szasz, Goffman and Foucault. The central ambition of anti-psychiatry has been to replace the so-called medical model of mental illness by a ‘labelling’ one, according to which the behaviours which provoked diagnoses of psychopathology were not manifestations of some underlying pathology but merely conduct found obnoxious by the labellers ...”

“... noticed the hitherto undirected members of the chorus uneasily wandering about the stage. He rose from his seat, rushed down to the front of the stalls to call a halt while he told them what to do. But operas are not so easily stopped as plays and the orchestra ploughed on relentlessly, with Gielgud trying to make himself heard. Suddenly his voice ...”

“... that Sure Start would be protected from the fiscal axe. But as demands on local government rose – councils are responsible for such areas of expenditure as adult social care, housing and children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) – his fine words were forgotten. By 2018, a thousand Children’s Centres, 30 per cent of the ...”

“... from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader, and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.’ This is Gibbon’s description of the murder of the mathematician and ...”

“... A friend​ who teaches in New York told me that the historian Peter Lake told him that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of Bedford had imitated to Lord John Russell who imitated it to Bertrand Russell who imitated it to Conrad Russell who imitated it to J ...”

“... until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. A collection of fugitive pieces, Carnival, Hysteria and Writing, will be published by Oxford next year with an introduction by Stuart Hall, with whom Allon studied at the Birmingham Centre for ...”

“... was either downplayed or seen as a justifiable punishment. Ten million Germans suffered in what Peter Gatrell describes as ‘a reckoning on a grand and terrible scale’: 2.7 million were expelled from the Sudetenland and other parts of Czechoslovakia; six million were driven out of Poland and hundreds of thousands from Yugoslavia, Hungary and ...”

“... women became a primary subject of her art, and she often featured her young sons, Hans and Peter, in her pictures of proletarian families. Searching self-portraits – Kollwitz produced more than a hundred in all media – also punctuate her oeuvre, which is meticulously surveyed in the current retrospective at MoMA (until 20 July). Largely ...”

“... As Peter the Great, Tsar of All the Russias, lay dying in 1725, the future of the Imperial dynasty hung on his choice of successor. Peter, the first to take the title of emperor, had issued a law granting to himself the power to appoint whoever he liked as successor, but had continued to ponder the question, having had his own eldest son condemned and executed for serving as a rallying-point for opposition ...”

“... describes the pleasures of eating a juicy melon (so easy on the molars) and recommends catmint and rose oil for treating scars and crushed lilies for venomous snakebites. This list of plants may have extended beyond those found in the monastery garden, but locals still call Reichenau the ‘Gemüseinsel’ (‘vegetable island’), and claim that its ...”

“... One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common. These two works ...”

“... he had known, though he soon left her and their young daughter for the journalist and actress Rose Caylor. They married in 1926 and remained together until his death in 1964.At the end of the First World War, Hecht was sent to Europe as a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. He saw in Germany, he later wrote, ‘all the inhumanity that I note today ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university ...”

“... a phrase. Suppose he has reached the top of page 96 of the Wake: Harik! Harik! Harik! The rose is white in the darik! And Sunfella’s nose has got rhinoceritis from haunting the roes in the parik! So all rogues learn to rhyme. When you have deduced the last sentence from ‘all roads lead to Rome’, and sniffed the roes and the ...”