“... Mike Figgis, who has made three feature movies in Hollywood: Internal Affairs, Liebestraum and Mr Jones, respectively a successful police thriller, a quirky psychological drama and a character study of a manic-depressive. It is a stretch to imagine him pitching his new movie, Leaving Las Vegas, in similar circumstances. Leaving Las Vegas is about a failed ...”

“... lines distributed among ten stanzas – the sort of poetry mathematics of which Peter Reading, an admirer of Armitage’s work, is master), but altogether another to write 1000 lines to a year-end deadline, not least when attempting an essentially public poem which reflects on our times and recollects some recent headline-grabbing ...”

“... at all except as a figment of one man’s amour fou. The exception is the Hazlitt scholar Stanley Jones. In the late 1960s he succeeded in tracing a direct descendant of Sarah’s younger brother, Micaiah Walker. He pursued certain trails this opened up for him, and published his findings about her and her family in his biography, William Hazlitt: A Life ...”

“... Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally perverse. In some respects, moreover, their book belongs ...”

“... veto has in fact been a headache for the World Service, most recently stopping its director, Peter Horrocks, from closing as many language services as he originally proposed as a way of managing the cuts. Such tensions are not new. ‘We would have extended our broadcasts in a number of ways to different languages,’ recalls John Tusa, who ran the World ...”

“... few meagre inches of pious editorial. Writing in the Guardian three days after the story broke, Peter Jenkins talked of ‘the practical question of what should be done about the Fleet Street heavy mob bivouacking in Hertfordshire and Wiltshire, the Prime Minister pursued wherever she goes not by lobby correspondents but by crime ...”

“... Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon made Bogart a star, although the refugee Peter Lorre provides the film’s only moment of genuine fright Wilder, the German refugee screenwriter, and Chandler, the Hammett heir, brought the two figures, investigated and investigator, together in Double Indemnity. Taking the point of view of Fred ...”

“... allowed to marry in the South of France, with both mothers in attendance. The early sections of Peter Sussman’s Decca, a vast collection of Mitford’s letters, cover this period. For those who take pleasure in the ironies of epistolary communication (or non-communication), there are some gems here. One is the clever forgery, written by Mitford and ...”

“... Romano, described him as an ‘industrial Saturn … devouring his sons’. The following month, Peter Collins died in a crash at the German Grand Prix. A race steward heard him say ‘like Musso’ before he lost consciousness. In October, Father Leonardo Azzollini wrote an article in the Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica calling for motor racing to be ...”

“... to acknowledge as indispensable two particular books about Caravaggio (by Andrew Graham-Dixon and Peter Robb) from which he has drawn an enormous amount.Sudden Death is full of asides: ‘As I write, I don’t know what this book is about. It’s not exactly about a tennis match … Maybe it’s just a book about how to write this book; maybe that’s what ...”

“... turn of Joan Littlewood at Stratford East and George Devine at the Royal Court. In recent years, Peter Brook has taken up the baton in Stratford and in Paris. All of them demonstrated, implicitly or explicitly, that the theatre is an art, a forum, a faith, something to be fought for. At the Royal Court George Devine instilled a system of values that gave the ...”

“... This is not just a question about thuggish vigilantes, but about honest misunderstanders. Lynne Jones has a very impressive piece about the distress of encountering, at a demonstration, a woman jubilant about her son’s performance in the Falklands War, and finding it impossible in any way to explain the protest to her. All this does not mean so much that ...”

“... and Jack Adams, Convenor at BL, Longbridge; not only Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, but Peter Carter, UCATT regional organiser; not only Royden Harrison, professor of social history at Warwick, but Jack Jones and Stan Newens MP; not only Robin Blackburn of New Left Review but Mike le Cornu, shop steward at ...”

“... be uncomplicated, drawing as they did on the Marxist scenario of class struggle – Gareth Stedman Jones’s classic Outcast London (1971) was significantly subtitled ‘A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society’. Traditional labour history had no doubts who the heroes and the villains were. Things are no longer so ...”

“... saying that it’s better to travel than to arrive. In this volume, Patrick Field quotes George Jones: ‘All my life I’ve been running from something. If only I knew what it was I’d know which direction to go.’ The most eloquent expression of this idea is in David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives (1991): ‘Transition is always a ...”