“... salt marsh, and beyond that, to the fast-moving waters of the Kyles of Lochalsh. Across the waters rose the hills of southern Skye, still dusted with snow. Nearby stood the unloved stone ruin of a barracks built to house government troops engaged on the Highland-suppressing project that followed Culloden. In those times, to southerners, the Highlands were a ...”

“... the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of ...”

“... union cultures. The brightest star in the left firmament was the Fife miner, Lawrence Daly, who rose to the post of NUM General Secretary under the presidency of Scargill’s predecessor, Joe Gormley. Daly was in many ways the opposite of Scargill: intellectually curious, extraordinarily well-read, ostensibly – and certainly in his later years, when he ...”

“... later, Elliott went back to London, without enough evidence even for a prosecution. On 16 January, Peter Lunn, who had replaced Elliott as Beirut station chief, ordered Philby to report to the British Embassy, where it would have been possible to arrest him. Philby pleaded continued problems with his head injury and didn’t go. He later told Eleanor that ...”

“... only a few months in office. The best account of Putin’s origins in these three books comes from Peter Truscott. He can be an annoying writer, pausing often to puff out his feathers and crow about how well he knows the great and good, or to gloat over the boring protocol details of state visits at which he was present (Truscott was an MEP, with excellent ...”

“... arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something wonderful’. After she ...”

“... of virtuoso psychiatrist-bashing. (Both also provided the occasion for first-rate books: on Peter Sutcliffe, Gordon Burn’s Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son and Nicole Ward-Jouve’s The Street-Cleaner; on Dennis Nilsen, Brian Masters’s Killing for Company.) Before the 1981 trial of Peter Sutcliffe for the 13 ...”

“... because of the tonal structure as much as for any other reason. ‘It seems astonishing,’ writes Peter Gradenwitz after offering his readers a ponderous analysis of West Side Story, ‘and may even perhaps appear unnecessary to regular show-business habitués, that it is possible to dissect and analyse the music of a Broadway show in the same way as a ...”

“... Joseph Chamberlain’s extraordinary career is one good source of answers to those questions. Peter Marsh’s biography is the fifth substantial one in thirty years, but justifies itself on the grounds that it is the first to cover Chamberlain’s whole career in a single volume and to give adequate weight to his business background. Marsh has sought to ...”

“... Even inferior tradesmen had to be kept at bay. The Great Fire of London – the point at which Peter Thorold’s book begins – led to an outflow of the dingier homeless from the City westward. Some were absorbed in rookeries and Alsatias, packed with thieves and noseless beggars, or in the sizable slum which adjoined Whitehall. There was no welcome for ...”

“... Miller still had their quota of rouged youths. But at long last the IQ level of the Footlights rose into triple figures. Successively onto the scene came such butch illuminati as Miller, Michael Frayn and Peter Cook, with results that Mr Hewison obviously finds it much less uncomfortable to write about, even if it ...”

“... clutching them with their tiny black bodies bent for mating. As Toby and Lucy watched, the ants rose, locked together and rising higher into the air. Wherever they turned the sky was full of them. They got up and began to dash them from their clothes. Toby felt the tiny bodies against his fingers as he brushed them away. ‘It’s marvellous.’ Lucy was ...”

“... there was only one child, a girl. This was a mistake: she was supposed to have been a boy called Peter, and although she was baptised Gerda Erika Maria, her father never called her anything but Peter. Appearances mattered to the young Rösels. My mother has told me that my grandmother went hungry so that she could afford ...”

“... of recruiting the writer as a graduate assistant, ‘would you study the gospel with anyone but St Peter?’ – but also a lovable completism. At Yasnaya Polyana, an ‘International Tolstoy Scholar’ insists on sitting in a stream that Tolstoy used to bathe in, a stream now ‘partly obstructed, and full of vegetable life’. The scholar comes out ...”

“... postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within it. It was her natural mode to épater les bourgeois, starting with her ...”