“... exploit the fears of all sections of society who suffer from Conservative attempts to demolish it. Peter Shore displays the greatest awareness of such an approach when he writes what is a remarkably frank eulogy of both Labour and Conservative governments after 1945. Gerald Kaufman, who, incidentally, is going to restore Rutland and the Soke of ...”

“... a new idea. It is easiest to make such changes when the playwright is dead. John Osborne and Peter Nichols did not want Miller to alter their plays, but he was more fortunate when he directed Robert Lowell’s version of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Since Miller did not want to set this play in the Caucasus, with an actor tied to a rock, he ...”

“... incongruities – but the tsar had good reason to be sceptical of the institution. His grandfather Peter III ruled Russia for only six months before his wife, Catherine the Great, overthrew him in a palace coup in 1762 and shipped him off to prison, where he was quietly murdered. Nominally, Catherine ruled as regent for her son Paul, but once he reached ...”

“... Does Peter Lake​ ever sleep? Even at 666 pages this is not the longest of his books, which descend on the study of the decades around 1600 like a great waterfall. There are no signs of fatigue, no inanimate sentences. Behind the loosely conversational manner of his prose lies a precision of thought and structure ...”

“... the first in August 1597, the second two in 1598 (‘the only instance except that of Pericles’, Peter Ure has observed, ‘of a Shakespearean quarto going into two editions in the same year’). The success of a play in print did not necessarily betoken success on the stage. Even so it would be surprising to find a member of Shakespeare’s company speaking ...”

“... like an evasion, a tricksy manoeuvre by Coetzee to sidestep saying what he ‘really’ believed. Peter Singer, one of Coetzee’s designated respondents, was particularly exasperated: ‘I prefer to keep truth and fiction clearly separate.’ Others saw it as an effective polemical gesture, concisely articulating the proposition that ideas are always an ...”

“... to write La Clemenza di Tito reads like a detective story. Because Haydn was in London, Prince Esterhazy was forced to choose Salieri’s star pupil – and Haydn’s godchild – Joseph Weigl to write the large-scale cantata for the festivities marking his installation as lord-lieutenant of Oedenburg, in August 1791. (‘You could have saved me ...”

“... it not only poems but short stories of delightful quaintness (‘“Heigh-ho,” cried the restive Prince, “where can she be? and why this infidel delay when she cares not a jack about me” ’). A totally conscientious editor, Patricia Willis lets no sparrow fall to the ground. One is impressed by the sheer volume of the reviews, done over a very long ...”

“... he adjusted the measurements upwards. He thought it impregnable but was proved wrong by his tenant Peter the Great, who had come to observe the royal dockyard, and was apparently trundled in and out through the hedge in a wheelbarrow, causing immense damage. I worry about those who pushed him. Read Sylva and Evelyn is before you. He can be pedantic, he can be ...”

“... if engaged in deep arithmetical calculations’. By 1860, he had proved himself to be the ‘prince of detectives’ (as a colleague called him), a man who could see through fraudsters and uncover jewel thieves. He was dispatched to Road Hill on the instructions of the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police as ‘an intelligent officer’, the best man ...”

“... White Penis’ as a man dangerously paralleled not only with Shylock but with the black Prince of Morocco, and engaged in a tricky category-trading negotiation to remain within the entitled bracket of whiteness alongside Bassanio while still embodying homosexual desire. Little’s white people also include the present-day white interpreters ...”

“... Park prose. There are some – and not just reluctant New Georgians – who dissent from all this. Prince Charles, who recently toured the area with Business in the Community, has come out against the new aesthetic. But the age of the bleeding heart is over, and this Royal whinge about the conditions in which many Bengalis live and work was too much for one ...”

“... his ‘vision of an earthly paradise’, devoid of sexual taboos or sense of sin. He got to know Prince Sihanouk, and is convinced that he was anything but the ‘political clown’ detractors made him out; rather, ‘a master of political disguise’, fully alive to the perils surrounding his country. It was a steep come-down to his successor, the American ...”

“... because I may be some help on Commons’). Blair also offered advice to Rupert and James Murdoch. Peter Mandelson offered to prep Brooks for an appearance before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Two Conservative peers gave glowing character references: Baron Black of Brentwood, a former director of the Press Complaints Commission, for ...”

“... imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent afterword reminds us, Barton’s interest in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem ...”