“... one of his pictures. He answered, “Sometimes translate it into black, and at another time into white. If a bit of black give the emphasis, so does red in my picture, and in the case of translating it into white,” he said, after a brief reflection, “put a grinning line into it that will make it attractive.” ’ The ...”

“... to a flattened existence.The reader first glimpses Ivan through the eyes of his older brother, Peter. ‘Didn’t seem fair on the young lad,’ the novel begins, eavesdropping on Peter’s internal monologue, ‘That suit at the funeral.’ Peter, a human rights barrister, is ten ...”

“... knowledge of, and evident affection for, Sayers’s fiction – the detective stories about Lord Peter Wimsey especially. And now, she comes forward with what will surely rank as the definitive biography of Sayers. It is not a book which contains any surprises for those of us who have read the previous biographies. Indeed, Dr Reynolds gives us rather ...”

“... Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a heart attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal ...”

“... my disorders. He can say between one and three years, assuming I don’t get an infection that my white cell system isn’t strong enough to prevent from turning into fatal pneumonia rather than a common cold. The uncertainty is real. Onc Doc’s skills are essentially statistical. Reading papers that include and conclude from other studies the mean average ...”

“... My first encounter with Peter Medawar revealed something about us both. When he was the new Mason Professor of Zoology in the University of Birmingham I was a student at University College, Nottingham, and one of my tasks as president of the student Zoological Society was to give votes of thanks to visiting speakers ...”

“... citizen, described by Robert Fagles as ‘arguably the finest Classicist of our day’, by Peter Green as one his nation ‘ought to bronze’, and by Jasper Griffin as a man ‘one would like to have as a friend’. In his long career he has written on many subjects: scholarly articles on the heroes of Attic drama in its golden age, unsentimental ...”

“... Early on in this book there is a photograph of the British architect Peter Cook’s living-room ‘circa 1970’. Cook is now Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium for the 2012 London Olympics. But he was a young adventurer back then, a founder of the archetypal 1960s and 1970s avant-garde architects’ collective Archigram, which came up with never built but influential schemes for futuristic ‘walking’ buildings and ‘plug-in’ cities ...”

“... away towards the Firth of Clyde. And I took the tie off and stuffed it into my back pocket. Peter York’s Eighties happened elsewhere. Little bits of it were no doubt happening in the shopping mall over my head that morning, but most of it was well out of reach, and nothing to do with our world at all. He had a lovely time, he tells us. The Eighties ...”

“... The Sloane Ranger style, Peter York has told us, reflects ‘a state of mind that’s eternal’. This may be putting it a bit strongly: but the Sloane ancestry goes back at least to the days when knighthood was in flower and one really needed a pony. Like British trade unions, Sloanes have deep roots as a defensively-organised collective, and ‘What Really Matters’ to them may well matter differently, or not matter at all, to everyone else ...”

“... our creators, they are our older cousins. The film looks great. The landscapes, mostly grey and white, are full of sombre beauty, and you have no idea how well-endowed the executive suite on an up-to-date spaceship can be – I mean will be. There is an android who makes cups of tea, learns ancient languages and models his diction and appearance on ...”

“... This book begins with real passion as Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw lash into those historians who they believe have made unwarranted assumptions about the links between Britain and South Africa: to wit, that Britain fought the Boer War to get its hands on the gold and that economic considerations remained the motivating force in its difficult relationship with South Africa thereafter ...”

“... affiliations. Colour is not a precise language – it is black for mourning in some societies and white in others – but there are enough associations (warm reds, ice greens) for it to have a poetry of association. Black dyes have always been in demand. They are as close as you can get to no colour at all. The lawyer’s gown, the dark business suit and the ...”

“... fill the rest of the scene (a youth with two spears guards Antigone; behind Creon is a boy, and a white-haired woman, perhaps his wife). The painter probably had a play in mind; the portico, in which Heracles stands, will be part of the permanent stage-set. Aristotle quite certainly had a play in mind, for he quotes a verse from it.There was, then, not just ...”

“... the cities. The policy revision designated as Presidential Directive 59, issued by the Carter White House in August 1980, stipulates that enemy command and control networks and military bases would become the primary targets in a ‘prolonged, limited’ nuclear war. Even so, some cities and towns would inevitably be blown away, then doubtless more, then ...”