“... recent years that reading has been challenged by academics, critics and some theatre practitioners keen to question the play’s impact and legacy. They have argued for the rehabilitation of the supposedly moribund theatrical culture that preceded Look Back in Anger, proposed alternative agents for the great changes in the British theatre which undoubtedly ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... Prince’s androgyny if he’d wanted to – even with that Princess Di shag cut – but he was keen to show he was a grown man, a proper album artist, not an inoffensive, family-friendly pop idol.To launch his solo career he adopted a late-1970s Meatpacking District persona: hairy chest, tight jeans, Western boots, leather jacket, aviators, white ...”

“... of enslaving the imperial soul – the indignity and perplexity is captured with good humour by Peter Reading: I used to pepper my poetics with sophisticated allusions to dear Opera and divine Art (one was constantly reminded of A. du C. Dubreuil’s libretto for Piccinni’s Iphigenia in Tauris; one was constantly reminded of Niccolo di Bartolomeo da ...”

“... Lopez refers approvingly to ‘the beginner’s mind to which Buddhists aspire’. His keen attention suggests the ‘mindfulness’ of Zen practitioners, a connection made explicit in Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, which is ‘nature writing’ and Buddhist primer in roughly equal proportions. Thoreau ...”

“... in New York, attracting a disproportionate amount of financial support from a new breed of keen young collectors, with Charles Saatchi at the helm. These favoured artists are the so-called masters of Post-Modernism. If anyone tells you that there is no such thing as Post-Modernism, because there was never any such thing as Modernism, sit them down in ...”

“... or a ‘challenge’. Old age holds out promises as well as threats. Many are living to enjoy what Peter Laslett has termed the Third Age: a period of health, often lasting as long as childhood and adolescence together, free from the anxieties of child-care and the pressures of work. Out of such elders, remote from the stereotypes of decrepitude, may come a ...”

“... Lowell was 19, is to Ezra Pound. He describes himself as eccentric, subject to violent passions, keen to learn to be a poet – to ‘work under you and forge my way into reality’. Pound replied, and Lowell soon wrote again, reaffirming his intention to study with the poet, on whom depended such hope as we moderns have of rediscovering the great art of ...”

“... communities, attached to their traditional landmarks and rituals, and the Church’s hierarchy, keen to make a fresh start. Walsham admires the ‘energy and inventiveness of Catholic Christianity in the late medieval period’ and believes that by 1500 it had ‘all but displaced’ memories of ancient paganism. Even so, she stresses that the higher clergy ...”

“... clock crept round to eleven. ‘Shouldn’t have to do it,’ she would snap. ‘Too senior. Let Peter Metcalfe do it. Let Whatsi Willis do it, he can’t be thirty.’ When he came in my mother smelled alcohol on his breath. ‘Surely not risking your licence?’ She looked brittle. ‘It’s the atmosphere there at Minshull Street,’ he said. ‘It’s ...”

“... friend’ to a (male) correspondent as ‘just our kind of girl … bracing and witty and kind and keen on drink’, and by the end of the decade she was his constant companion. He always claimed to love them both, but it was Penelope, handful that she was, who suffered his loss both emotionally and financially. Elizabeth determinedly kept them apart and John ...”

“... two children by Wisdom; her remarriage to Gottfried Lessing and subsequent escape with their son, Peter, to England with the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing in her suitcase; and so on. But Klein is too baffled by Lessing and the choices she made, and usually too disapproving of them, to probe the connection between the life and the work. This is ...”

“... frivolity and public school backbone, was educated at Haileybury and Cambridge. As the critic John Peter has put it, ‘parts of the Criterion resembled a supplement to the Tablet – while, incomprehensibly, other parts were crowded with Marxists and moderns.’ Read was an anarchist who accepted a knighthood, a champion of avant-garde art who also edited the ...”

“... at all, the two young men were approvingly described by Fawcett as ‘strong as horses and keen as mustard’. One discerns the defiant – or fatal – note of amateurism. This was the team that set out to find the mysterious city of Z: three toffs from the English shires, a few native porters, some mules (for the early stages) and a pair of ...”

“... Ireland Secretary after a mass break-out of Republican prisoners from the Maze prison, and Peter Brooke failed in a more recent attempt to leave the same office after he had sung a song on a television chat show in the Republic of Ireland, hours after seven people had been killed in a particularly bad atrocity in the Province. While ministers have been ...”