“... Sherman, who himself plays the dissipated drunkard Maximillian Cady. Cady and his successor, Norman Maine in A Star is Born, stand for many careers that foundered in drink and suicide. Today’s Hollywood producers and executives make more literal use of watering holes. Deals are christened with Perrier and story-pitching film-makers are met with clear ...”

“... to conduct the Government’s business: David Simon from BP, Martin Taylor from Barclays Bank, Peter Davis from the Pru, even that devoted Thatcherite Alan Sugar of Tottenham Hotspur. Past Labour Governments had made some small effort to assert their democratic rights over unelected financial power. In the first weeks of the new Labour Administration in ...”

“... president of the National Union of Students; political adviser to Barbara Castle and then Peter Shore (there are shrewd portraits of both); local government (he was elected to the old Inner London Education Authority and became its deputy leader); Labour candidate, first in a hopeless seat, then the safe Labour seat of Blackburn, which he inherited ...”

“... of the period when, she points out, England and France formed a single cultural entity) in Anglo-Norman and French. What was going on during the same period in Italy, Germany or Spain falls outside the scope of Cooper’s inquiry. More puzzling is the omission of certain classical Greek and Latin texts influential in the romance tradition with which she is ...”

“... Globus, then the heads of Cannon Films, to make a film version of King Lear, with a script (!) by Norman Mailer, in which Mailer and his daughter would star as Lear and Cordelia. After half a day’s shooting, Mailer and his daughter walked off the set and Godard tore up the script, beginning again with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald. Woody Allen did a ...”

“... increase its underground following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum ...”

“... in a fitting manner by the biggest tent show in the universe. As the Minister without Portfolio, Peter Mandelson, asserts in a document issued by the Cabinet Office: ‘millenniums only come once in a thousand years.’ Or at approximately the same interval as Labour governments with a mandate to do whatever they want, with absolutely no come-back, in the ...”

“... a ‘romanticism of no possible belief’. With this phrase the story changes tack: the word ‘Peter’ is abstracted from Petersburg and becomes the name of a character to whom frenzied love letters are addressed (the high-low speech of these letters, their lurches of logic and cadence, make them terrifically and authentically mad, as anyone who has ...”

“... of decisive incidents, both familiar and sombre: the Notting Hill Riots of 1958; Tory candidate Peter Griffiths winning Smethwick six years later with the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’; Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in 1968; the New Cross fire of 1981 which killed 13 young black men and women; the riots in St ...”

“... with him. The story goes that Schoenberg dismissed him, telling him he lacked an ear for harmony. Peter Yates’s book Twentieth-Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound (1968), reported Schoenberg as saying that Cage was ‘not a composer – but an inventor of genius’, a back-handed compliment that stuck ...”

“... and more boring, at all events more compassionate. A second rearguard action is mounted by Peter J. Casagrande (he’s American, and thanks the General Research Fund of the University of Kansas), who shows at inordinate length in the Annual that Hardy from time to time knew he lacked magnanimity (‘largeness of soul’) and worried about it, in Return ...”

“... If this goes on, Conservatives will soon have to choose their heroes from a short list of Montague Norman, Lord Eldon, Judge Jeffreys and (possibly) Bonar Law. We are now enjoying the fruits of the monetarist revolution, and the sans-culottes of monetarism seek to deflect criticism by denouncing the alleged follies of the Ancien Régime. So what took place ...”

“... likely to have – and Murdoch has done his bit in furthering it. He and Robert Stigwood financed Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli (1981), which stands in this tradition. A ‘radical’ rhetoric armed Murdoch for his invasion of the United States. In what McKnight calls a ‘deep political transformation’, America and a neoconservative view of the country ...”

“... meet. He began his career as a proponent of the non-fiction novel pioneered by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer; his first book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984), was a painstaking re-creation of the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. He topped that with an account of Fred and Rosemary West’s ...”

“... 1980s, he seems to glance back at bygone cultural positivity in a semi-ironical spirit. Compare Peter Halley and his ‘prison’ paintings of dayglo grids, which revisit Modernist design as a malign scheme of social control, or the affectless mixer-machine colour binges of Damien Hirst’s ‘spin’ and ‘spot’ paintings. Such sardonic palettes ...”