“... MENA markets on the fringe.One thing I did see in my WhatsApp messages, however, was how much Peter Mandelson had been upsetting my Labour friends. How glad he was, he said, that the current leadership had ‘drain[ed] the swamp that sort of enveloped the Labour Party under Corbyn’, by which he meant ‘all the far-left extremists and antisemites’, of ...”

“... a wine glass escaped a locked cabinet in the kitchen and smashed; Alma’s teacup and saucer rose from her hands, the saucer splitting neatly in mid-air; a huge piece of coal in the grate careered across the living room and slammed into the wall. On an inside page the Sunday Pic featured a photograph of Alma, Les and Don – ‘occupants of the house of ...”

“... his Irenicum, which attacked Nonconformism as entirely without justification. As Stillingfleet rose through the established Church eventually to become Bishop of Worcester, Mortlock rose with him to become Master of the Stationers’ Company. In the same year that he published Order and Disorder, Mortlock published a ...”

“... been looking in the suitcase, I’ve been consulting other sources: my father’s younger brother, Peter, now a robust 86; family photographs; stamp albums; public records; other people’s suitcases; books; barely legible notes despatched to me by my mother, who has a macular hole and a keen memory and styles herself ‘Research Department’ – the kind of ...”

“... with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was ...”

“... We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first husband, Peter and Jill’s father . . . you do, that’s good. They were Surrey people: they had a grand house in Caterham. Graham was a rich fellow, talented, energetic, generous; he’d made most of his money as a printer: he published the daily stock exchange ...”

“... spirit appeared in his room in East Harlem and declaimed ‘The Sunflower’ and ‘The Sick Rose’ in an unearthly voice. A lot of people thought he’d gone mad. As late as 1952 he was hoping a new analyst would ‘cure’ him of his homosexuality and help him integrate into society. But in 1954 he moved to San Francisco where he found a new type of ...”

“... in farming communities reported experiencing orgasm as a result of animal contact, a number that rose to 65 per cent in some rural settings. In his study of American women in 1953, Kinsey found that just under 4 per cent had engaged in sexual activity with an animal since adolescence; almost all these cases involved dogs or cats. In 1974, the sexologist ...”

“... Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally perverse. In some respects, moreover, their book belongs ...”

“... before. Physical planning became something of a dirty word in this country, she explains, after Peter Hall and the other freedom-loving authors of ‘Non-Plan’ tried to prise Britain out of the rigidities of the postwar planning system at the end of the 1960s. But the results were not what they intended, propelling us down the free-market path and ...”

“... Vries arranges the natural world in sensory forms. The centrepiece is a two-metre-wide circle of rose petals on the floor; you can smell them from the avenue beyond. On the walls are tableaux of 84 samples of earth from different parts of the world – an abstract pattern of yellows, pale greys, orange-reds, burnt and dusky browns – and From the Laguna, a ...”

“... highlighted in numerous pessimistic analyses, including Colin Crouch’s Post-Democracy (2000) and Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void (2013). Trade union membership in the UK peaked at more than 50 per cent of the workforce in 1979, but has since declined to just 23 per cent. The mantra of ‘choice’ and ‘competition’ in public services, which was central to ...”

“... inexperienced driver’s grinding of the gearbox: ‘The servant pulls up another stool … Mesihi rose when he saw Michelangelo approaching and greeted him gracefully.’ Enard wasn’t an inexperienced writer even when the French original appeared in 2010, though it is his more recent success with Boussole, Goncourt Prize-winner in 2015 – translated as ...”

“... have struggled to turn a profit; many have ended up at one point or another in unscrupulous hands. Peter Cook’s venture, the Establishment, was taken over by gangsters in 1963; in 1972 John Aspinall sold the Clermont to Playboy as its main London casino. In 1976, George Marks, a jovial Canadian-American property developer with a silver Rolls-Royce, offered ...”

“... Others, sound at heart, were wearied by the struggle and simply hoped it would go away. As I rose from my sick bed, I was convinced that the Labour Party was past saving from within. The response to the Limehouse Declaration was immediate and overwhelming. It was as if a vast crowd of men and women had been assembling in silence to wait for the ...”