“... As spectators we seem to have changed quite a bit in recent times. At the opera or in the concert-hall there is nowadays, as never before so generally, an obligatory baying as the last note sounds; it is indeed becoming a competition, the first yell winning, as in Bingo. The winner is displaying the intensity of his appreciation but also as nearly as makes ...”

“... or despairing, about Starmer: his response to the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, his dalliance with Peter Mandelson. Against Burnham are the Labour-hostile media and the online posters of the right, now swivelling against him. There are also the powerful facts of the recent local elections. In the area Burnham hopes to represent, Labour took an absolute ...”

“... Miss Smithson’ – a black veil with wisps of straw tastefully interwoven amongst the hair. As Peter Raby puts it, in a biography which for the first time gives her side of the story, ‘the conjunction of beauty, forlorn love, madness and premature death’ was irresistible to the French. Through her, Shakespeare suddenly became a central part of French ...”

“... smiling tolerance among his menaces of damnation’. Recent writing on the English Reformation by Peter Lake, Nicholas Tyacke and others has exploded Eliot’s account of Andrewes as the voice of a tranquil via media, a man whose confidence sprang from the settled possession of ‘a formed visible church behind him’. His early religious opinions took shape ...”

“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the ...”

“... gradually became familiar to reviewers. As early as June 1962, a Times critic at a Wigmore Hall concert where music by Cage, Feldman and Christian Wolff was played noted with pleasure that Cardew ‘actually played the piano instead of trying to demolish it’. It took time, though, for the new experimental music to be widely accepted in London. Cardew ...”

“... she is holding a glass of water. Breezes blow. The scent of violet wafts inexplicably across the hall. Like a proper medium, Alma soon produces a spirit guide or ‘control’, Bremba, a dead Persian, who speaks for her in a deep voice. The institute’s members are impressed. Countess Nora Wydenbruck sees Alma’s apports as miracles like those produced by ...”

“... yet to be appreciated by Westerners.’ George Harrison and Ravi Shankar at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 September 1974. Images of Shankar – sitting cross-legged on a carpet, playing his sitar – have become synonymous with Indian classical music, yet when his story is told it too often focuses on his starry associations. Through his friendship with ...”

“... photofacsimile of Domesday Book was advertised by Publications Alecto. Meanwhile, in the Great Hall at Winchester, the Phillimore edition was exhibited, and the Alecto facsimile again advertised, in the very place where the original Domesday Book was in hand in 1086.* The impending 1986 celebrations might well have prompted the publication of the second ...”

“... insecurity and make clear the precariousness of their position on what its current first minister, Peter Robinson of Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, once described as ‘the window ledge of the Union’. A colonial strangeness lurks behind such seemingly familiar phenomena as student drunkenness. Belfast’s Holy Land is an area between Queen’s ...”

“... Abdul Haq returned to Scotland and accused Sarwar of breaking up his family. He hooked up with Peter Paton, a strange soul who was standing against Sarwar as an independent Labour candidate in Govan. Paton had been a Labour Party member, then an independent Conservative, then a fervent Mike Watson supporter: through all these guises he remained steadfast ...”

“... to broach the subject. Today, by contrast, a scarred identity earns almost universal respect. Peter Singer’s Pushing Time Away reflects this shift. He used to be, he says, far too busy writing his philosophy to bother with his grandfather. It was only when he noticed an affinity between his work on ‘practical ethics’ and his maternal grandfather’s ...”

“... that Piano first worked closely with another influential figure, the brilliant Irish engineer Peter Rice of Ove Arup. In fact, after Piano and Rogers separated in 1978, Piano teamed with Rice, and, though they parted in 1981, Rice consulted for the office until his death in 1992. With such influences and interests Piano was in the thick of progressive ...”

“... on Broadway and in movies. After her death in 1937, a memorial concert was held at Carnegie Hall. But Smith’s country cousins – ‘walking musicians’ – were lucky if they got recorded at all. ‘They were the offside,’ the Mississippi talent scout H.C. Speir said. ‘They never was known … to anybody.’By the time record companies got round ...”

“... on the defeat of the British army in South Africa. He held an anti-war meeting in Birmingham Town Hall, the heartland of Chamberlain’s political fief, and insisted that it go ahead when everyone from the chief constable down pleaded with him to cancel it. The result was the virtual sack of the town hall by a Union ...”