“... bonds of good fellowship in the Westminster-Fleet Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by ...”

“... and last words in the book come from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and those on the jacket from Paul McCartney, so that Fraser is effectively handed over to showbiz. In reality, showbiz was in the margin of his life. He was a creative figure in the art world whose motivation for dealing was neither profit nor fame but a fascination with art and artists and ...”

“... it contained little that was not in Jerome’s My Life and Times, his novelised autobiography Paul Kelver, or his essays. Sir James Barrie, a friend of Jerome, was asked for recollections and said that everything relevant was in My Life and Times. Others apparently took a similar view. They could have been conspiring to conceal something, or they could ...”

“... Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers – is rather more efficiently handled but is still far from expert. Paul overdoses his mother’s milk with her whole prescription of morphia tablets, which he and his sister have pulverised. Mrs Morel evidently guesses why her night-time drink is so bitter, but drinks nevertheless. This is in line with the drill laid down in ...”

“... Bordoni:Which life is for meThe peaceful or the stormy?Which is the right manWalt Whitman or Paul Whiteman?Given the options of gay or straight, tempestuous or dependable, cruising or monogamous, Porter tended to chose both. He married Linda in 1919; they soon became ‘Les coleporteurs’, star turns on the Continental social merry-go-round. The ...”

“... insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner at the firm until last month, when Starmer appointed her to the Lords and made her an education minister.At the party conference last year, Starmer told a ‘business forum’ of more than two hundred executives and lobbyists that ...”

“... extremely excited when reading the early papers of the distinguished Austrian/American biologist, Paul Weiss, who had transplanted the legs of a salamander from back to front and left to right and found the specificity of the original position not only retained but reflected in the very limb movements. Medawar was so entranced and intrigued by the phenomenon ...”

“... could.’ This was the sketchy outline I carried with me to New York on a trip, with the producer Paul Quinn, to research a radio programme about the Beat heritage. I’d never been there before, never met Corso. I’d seen him, in the tweed sports jacket of a young academic, performing, sober, at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 ...”

“... and skirts that could be worn in different combinations); trousers; and, the great couturier Paul Poiret’s stroke of genius, a dress that a woman could put on without assistance. This discrepancy between women’s experience and men’s may be one reason why dress has come to be seen as a predominantly female subject, or at least one that is expressed ...”

“... from the Philological Society and the biographical dictionary from the commercial publisher George Smith. With these two projects OUP inherited a curatorial responsibility which has, over the years, become increasingly burdensome. Unlike the National Heritage Commission, OUP has the task not just of conserving important national properties – that is to ...”

“... to their deserts, whether these be good or bad’. The resurrection of the body, derived from St Paul, is still part of Catholic doctrine, though it has always posed problems. Will the resurrected bear the marks of whatever illness or injury killed them? What about widows who remarried? Will some people be older than their parents? There were always ...”

“... peak of the genre, Waterstone’s introduced a new section labelled ‘Painful Lives’ and W.H. Smith offered the category ‘Tragic Life Stories’. The passion for true-life unhappiness was partly responsible for fiction being seen as concealed autobiography. When I wrote a novel in 1989 narrated by an infant without a brain telling the story of its ...”

“... that her presence saved the lives of the other staff on several occasions. Norman Cigar and Paul Williams argue that war crimes prosecutions are necessary not simply for the well-rehearsed reasons – ending cultures of impunity, achieving ‘closure’, restoring faith in due process – but because they seek to establish individual responsibility ...”

“... by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say I’m designing St Paul’s’ (a building which he completed in 1710). Hill’s poem lives locally in these small, self-delighting verbal graces that can have the air of deft contrivance or happy accident, while its more momentous and even ominous compulsions work themselves out ...”

“... sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism’. Churchill’s threnody to an already mythical soldier-poet appeared in the Times three days after his death: ‘Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classical symmetry of mind and body, he was ...”