“... as the obvious turning point in the development of ‘music as thought’. The German composer Peter Cornelius (known to choristers everywhere as the composer of ‘The Three Kings’) asserted that everyone can feel the difference between Haydn and Mozart on the one hand, and Beethoven on the other. ‘Some call it depth, humour, subjectivity … We for ...”

“... the desert very exciting, because there’s nothing there. You won’t find a tree or a rock or a bush. You won’t find anything at all, except sand dunes. You can pretend you’re lost in there. You can get lost in there. It’s very beautiful. Even Jane [his wife] thought it very beautiful, the most beautiful place you ever saw. I don’t try to analyse ...”

“... American values’ in Russia over the past decade. Condoleezza Rice and other members of President Bush’s foreign policy team have even begun echoing those leftist critics, such as Stephen Cohen, who miss no opportunity to denounce ‘the disastrous failure of US policy towards post-Communist Russia’. Best known for his 1973 study of Bukharin, Cohen is ...”

“... first important critical essay (‘Notes on Agreement and Elegance’) came out as a prose bramble-bush which intimidated many readers. But he grew steadily out of that mode, perfecting his own unmistakeable and unpredictable manner with the language. Though few realised it, he continued to write remarkable verse for the rest of his life, which he apparently ...”

“... China and the US. In the early 1990s, Beijing sent officials to be trained in Singapore, but Peter Sloterdijk’s line that statues of Mao will one day be replaced with ones of LKY now seems a dated exuberance. The meritocratic ideology of Singapore has begun to show signs of wear, and its elite seems incapable of regenerating itself as that of the PRC ...”

“... Dowie, Jimmy Dyce, Charlie Logan, Margaret Logan, Bert Lumsden, George Manclark, Derek Stubbs, Peter Young and also Alex Falconer’). As this shows, they didn’t all have to be men, but usually they were. There is no doubt that Brown tried to re-create these bonds with groups of personal allies throughout his political career, and he often succeeded. His ...”

“... most of which would have been to pay for continuous care. Ledwidge also tells the story of ‘Peter’, who served with him in the same reservist unit. A talented linguist, physically fit and a promising commander, he was seen as an ideal candidate for special forces, but was seriously injured in a bomb attack in 2006. The MoD told him, wrongly, that as a ...”

“... and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of writing. There, British power was too close at hand. It generated another set of forms ...”

“... the message of the mujahideen seriously,’ the speaker continues. ‘Do not listen to the liars Bush and Blair who say that al-Qaida is finished. We are not spokespersons for al-Qaida but we pray in the same direction.’ I notice, at the back of the hall, two men in suits who are not journalists, though one of them holds a notebook. They listen ...”

“... inadequate equipment, friendly fire, or anything ignoble at all. And today, 15 June, comes George Bush paying a courtesy call on the Queen and Gordon Brown before having a cheering conscience-free get-together with his old mate Tony Blair. And here are the helicopters flying over Regent’s Park to prove it. 26 June, Espiessac. I sit in the wicker ...”

“... agreed that Miss Jones had taken her a couple of times to the Top of the Pops show at Shepherd’s Bush … ‘All I saw were a bunch of little kids jumping up and down.’ Peter Dow QC, for Miss Jones, asked: ‘Some of them got a chance that way?’ ‘Having lived with Janie,’ Miss G replied, ‘I know the scene ...”

“... an enduring (quasi-)Marxist current in British gay activism, represented by both Jeffrey Weeks and Peter Tatchell, has viewed ‘homosexuals’ as an oppressed class, like the proletariat, produced, along with housewives, by a historically contingent bourgeois sexual system which emerged alongside modern capitalism/consumerism in the 19th century. Its focus is ...”

“... imprisoned here too. The case comes up on BBC Question Time later on when the sleek and suited Peter Hain, now leader of the House of Commons, maintains that Hamza should be handed over to face justice (sic) in the United States, the same sort of justice (though nobody is indelicate enough to say this) as there used to be in South Africa at a time when ...”

“... also take on the White City shopping mall (a traffic island separating the Westway and Shepherds Bush), thereby defining mid-town London, the exhausted souks of Oxford Street, as a dead zone between exciting new retail destinations west and east. Planning permission has been given to Westfield for 13 million square feet of ‘mixed use’ development, with ...”