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“... kinds continues at an unflagging pace, often getting by without puns and politics. For example, Peter Thomson’s Shakespeare’s Professional Career is an exceptionally lively and up-to-the-minute introduction to ‘Shakespeare’s job’. It leans slightly towards the view that his family, and he himself residually, was Catholic, and argues with more ...”

“... Joseph Chamberlain’s extraordinary career is one good source of answers to those questions. Peter Marsh’s biography is the fifth substantial one in thirty years, but justifies itself on the grounds that it is the first to cover Chamberlain’s whole career in a single volume and to give adequate weight to his business background. Marsh has sought to ...”

“... advised along those lines by his national defence procurement officer, an old friend called Peter Levene whom Heseltine had promoted to high office, in controversial circumstances, at a starting salary of £95,000 a year. Levene had been chairman of United Scientific Holdings, whose recent success had been based to a large degree on the cooperation of ...”

“... we gleaned from German encrypted messages, but the chief of the SIS dissuaded him. Through Peter Floud, the brother of Bernard Floud, a Party member he had met in the Intelligence Corps, James arranged a meeting with a Russian who seemed to be an embassy official. (Sixty years later, after James’s death, it emerged that this was probably Ivan ...”

“... far more static, even regressive, for reasons among which human nature must rank high, or what Peter Clarke in a scrutiny in this volume of the British ‘social-democratic’ tradition calls the ‘deadweight of social conservatism, in all classes’. Part One of the collection, though entitled ‘The Working Class in British Politics’, shows it in ...”

“... is that the Labour ministers who eventually took over after her fall were in awe of her and keen to do her will. Her Tory successors have been regarded as cruder Thatcherites than Thatcher, but have possibly been more successful than her in dishing the welfare state. Less shrill than their mentor, they did by stealth what they have so far done in their ...”

“... This new urbanity contrasts with the ‘reptilian indifference to one another’ (Walsh quotes Peter Hill’s memorable phrase) of the instrumental lines in the introduction to The Rite of Spring. The symphony’s finale, ‘with its dazzling fugal and imitative exchanges, breathes a refinement that civilises the ferocity, without in any way drawing its ...”

“... evidence is contradictory; but it appears that as a young woman she had good features, a fine, keen, intelligent face, somewhat spoiled by prominent front teeth, which were removed when she was 40. She retained childhood memories of being rejected in favour of prettier girls; and in middle life she wrote of trying ‘to cure a serious feeling of rejection ...”

“... damage in society – the credulous, or the dogmatic. The worst case is that they get together: keen believers enthralled by doctrinaire fanatics. The devil appeared in modern society during the ‘satanic ritual abuse’ scandal of the 1980s, a panic that affected gullible social workers in this country and led to the removal of children from their ...”

“... off for Wales and Ireland, he had abandoned the hunt. Throughout the letters, however, he seems keen to draw attention to his delight in female company, archly alluding to a brief liaison with the famous singer Henriette Sontag, and, mysteriously, to a nude painted by Titian which comes to life for his benefit (and which presumably cost him a great deal of ...”

“... crewmembers didn’t. The battle ended in a truce. Palsson wonders why Hans Jonathan ‘was so keen to join the military power that had enslaved him’. Perhaps he was just swept up in the fervour that descended on the city, an atmosphere in which ‘every citizen of Copenhagen felt like a warrior,’ according to a letter written by Charlotte ...”

“... the levels of infection brought it to general attention. ‘This variant became of interest,’ Peter Horby, the chairman of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG), said on 23 December, ‘because there was an investigation of the increasing case numbers in Kent in early December, despite the national ...”

“... enough to deter Ashraf – or the Lords Chalfont and Weidenfeld, who turn up later at Princes Gate keen as mustard. Radji has sprinkled enough famous names through the diary to ensure a substantial readership. But how much good advice and informed opinion did he get for all his fine food and good wine? And was he really prepared to listen to unwelcome but true ...”

“... have been known for years and have been drawn on by biographers and critics like Morton Cohen and Peter Berresford Ellis. Here the Haggard collector and enthusiast D.S. Higgins has selected about one-fortieth of the text and presented it in an edition which deserves to be called amateur. He has not indicated omissions by ellipses, the annotation is ...”

“... supposedly eager to spend time with a nerdy guy three times their age. The podcast hosts were keen dissectors of that sordid mess, sometimes because it was their subject of study, and sometimes because they’d been on the fringe of that world themselves. Of course they had. Anyone in the upper reaches of American (or ...”