“... selling tickets for a benefit concert which starred the cast of Beyond the Fringe. At the gig, Peter Cook performed his Harold Macmillan routine, comparing the four-minute warning before a nuclear strike to Roger Bannister’s mile record (‘I’d like you to know that in this great country of ours a man can run a mile in four minutes’). In August I ...”

“... pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career as a police informer. Mokaba has become so prominent that it would be embarrassing for the ANC leadership to admit to this, so we suddenly found him cropping up at Mandela’s side to welcome ...”

“... I’d become a convert at the age of 16 when I attended a rally in London: it was in Central Hall, Westminster, and was led by a man called John Wimber, a big, serious man with a neatly trimmed beard who specialised in what he called the ‘ministry of signs and wonders’. Wimber had been the founder of a Christian community called the Vineyard ...”

“... In fact, many cinemagoers avoided or actively resisted German blandishments. Until Pearl Harbor, Peter Demetz remembers in his occupation memoir, Prague in Danger, cinemas in the city played American musicals, including the Broadway Melody series, to ‘packed houses’ that included the city’s many jazz-obsessed swing kids. In a novel set during the ...”

“... up on me. Mr Knocker put me down for a hairdresser and a Protestant. But there was always my Uncle Peter, a die-hard Celtic supporter – not like my brothers, but a real Celtic supporter, the sort who thought Rangers fans should be sent to Australia on coffin ships, or made to work the North Sea oilrigs for no pay – and Uncle ...”

“... for example, hidden behind the screen in The School for Scandal while two elderly knights as Sir Peter Teazle and Joseph Surface crawled with maddening deliberation and pointless pauses through their scene. Suddenly losing patience, she boomed aloud for all to hear: ‘Oh, do get a move on, you silly old pongers!’ Or the one about John Barrymore as Richard ...”

“... camera never moves. There are long, wide shots with landscapes of the revolution: the Maidan; a hall where protesters are sleeping; the soup kitchen. This is self-consciously anti-Eisenstein. There are few editing cuts, no stirring close-ups, no dynamic montage; the audience’s sympathies aren’t guided, they aren’t told where to look. Loznitsa wants to ...”

“... But Høyem was usually gone by the time I ran across the empty Aula, the glass-walled main hall, panting as I rushed from point to point of the star in search of my class (was it French or biology this morning?), until I bundled breathless into the right one, half proud of my lateness and obvious intoxication, half dreading a teacher would pull me up ...”

“... high points in any triumphalist account. When the great Maitland was dining as a guest at Trinity Hall, the Master referred contempiuously to ‘the little scraps and snips of information which a popular newspaper was in the habit of serving up for its readers’. ‘That,’ said Maitland, ‘is what we call Political Science here.’ Burrinchini’s opinion ...”

“... range of contemporary images, from cheap woodcuts to the expensive sculptures decorating the town hall of Amsterdam (now the royal palace), from Pieter de Hooch, the painter of interiors, to Romeyn de Hooghe, the printmaker. These images add a great deal to the immediacy of this attractive book. Description, however, is not the only aim of this study. We are ...”

“... specificity. The repeated refrain, ‘for the first time’, comes to sound like a music hall compère introducing a new act. He ridicules the crudity of a dualist pathology that divides everything into antinomies – normal/abnormal, healthy/sick etc – but then indulges in such antinomies himself. He describes Samuel Tuke, for example, as having ...”

“... Something had happened recently to confirm this in Bill’s mind. At school two years previously, Peter Kearney – a short, pinched boy with hair on his upper lip and eyebrows like soot smudges – had begun to taunt him, at first only about small things, but subsequently about things more serious, like the quality of his handwriting and the answers he gave ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... showed around twenty NF supporters, all men, giving Nazi salutes as they went into Southall Town Hall. Southall was one of the most racially diverse areas in London: in five wards surveyed in 1976, 46 per cent of the population had been born in the New Commonwealth. The National Front’s candidate, John Fairhurst, had stood in nearby Hayes and Harlington in ...”

“... in one of the Giardini’s most beautiful pavilions (designed by Sverre Fehn in 1962), is a hall of light and broken glass, where ethereal sounds are relayed by long angular speakers. The French have dug up three Scots pines and set them on slowly rotating platforms, one in the pavilion, two outside; they make an almost imperceptible waltz against the ...”