“... mole, she begs for the boy to come and rescue her. He is killed on the way, but a huge, red-brown dog arrives and rips the scoundrel’s neck out. It’s hard not to look for political allegories, the killer dog as an expression of the Revolution which is itself part of some sort of savage unconscious. Teffi must have been aware of similarly dark ...”

“... on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job ...”

“... which correspond to a little less than half of the published text: 44 per cent, according to Peter Davison’s estimate. These have now been published in an opulent edition: the right-hand pages of the book give a full-size photograph of the material, the left-hand pages contain Professor Davison’s transcription, laboriously deciphered, the cancellings ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel is partly a narrative, partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors. It is an important and a depressing book, its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel ...”

“... of the poet’s lost love: Miss Stacpoole. Yeats told John Quinn, in a letter quoted by Terence Brown in his foreword to the Selected Poems, that Mangan differed from the impersonal ballad writers of his time only ‘in being miserable’. Mangan’s relation to cultural nationalism is no longer as clear as it seemed in Newry. Joyce thought he was ‘little ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to ensure that their cables were never ‘flabby’ or ‘cute’. ‘Be strategically nasty,’ Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, recommended.The publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of 250,000 US diplomatic cables (only 6 per cent of them classified as ‘secret’) was treated by the national security establishment and its helpmates as ...”

“... still didn’t meet the needs of many sick and disabled people. In the late 1960s, the sociologist Peter Townsend showed that disability and chronic illness were two of the factors most likely to lead to poverty in the UK. The Nelson family, interviewed by Townsend’s team in 1968, was typical. Mr Nelson, 35, had worked as a driver, with a salary well above ...”

“... expanded, until eventually Levy set up his own small record label, Magnet. One of his clients, Peter Shelley, wrote a song called ‘My Coo-Ca-Choo’, and they advertised for someone to sing it. Then this happened: I had mixed feelings when a flamboyant, blond-haired 31-year-old knocked on our basement door a few days later and said he was our ...”

“... of dependency’. ‘Until recently,’ the paper asserted, ‘an English voter hearing Gordon Brown’s Fifeshire accent would simply have said to himself, “Labour”; now, he says: “Scottish.” The lopsided devolution settlement has created a sense that the Scots are having their cake and yet guzzling away at it.’ The newspapers accuse a Scottish ...”

“... the Formalists would say, is conveyed in the selection of poems translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France, and in France’s excellent study Poets of Modern Russia, which besides that on Pasternak contains informative essays on Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, and the poets of today. A particularly admirable feature of this Cambridge ...”

“... life, anyway, offers diversions. There is an affectionate portrait of another fellow conscript, Peter Stanford, who feels as passionately as Philip does about books and music and painting. More particularly, they feel the same way about writing. Writers were spies and interpreters who could undergo hardship and excess and emerge from the ordeal with ...”

“... them difficult to spot from the air.This slow progress allowed my father, Territorial Army Captain Peter Raban of (to give his full address) ‘A’ Troop, 265 Battery, 67th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, to spend much of 21 January putting the finishing touches to an unusually long and well-thought-out letter to my mother, which reads as if he put it ...”

“... as a member of the Kitchen Cabinet, along with Gerald Kaufman, Marcia Williams, Thomas Balogh and Peter Shore. Leaders, however, have difficulty in maintaining the unqualified devotion even of their closest followers. It is interesting to see that there were rumbles of discontent as early as June 1964, before Wilson was in office. ‘He is doing a great job ...”

“... depends on their rivers and mountains, frontiers and coastlines. In The Earth Transformed (2023), Peter Frankopan added climate to the list: drought in Central Asia caused the fall of empires in Europe, and the Little Ice Age did the same for the Ming dynasty in China. Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History (2023) studied plagues and their ...”