“... continues to receive nothing but the lowest insults. ‘I wonder if he was bullied at school,’ Alexander Chancellor wrote in the Guardian shortly after Canary Wharf: He looks as if he might have been. He exudes that combination of aloofness and self-satisfaction which invites bullying. I can imagine wanting to smash his glasses in the playground. I can ...”

“... Several biographies (including that of Wolfgang Leppmann, who takes his cue in this respect from Peter Demetz’s study of 1953) have made much of the young René Rilke’s Pre-Raphaelite affectations, his appearances in an abbé’s black habit on the Prague corso, giving away ‘to the poor’ copies of his first collection of poems; and it is a ...”

“... Arnold Schoenberg, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in ...”

“... of what you can get away with.Updike and Mary (who had four children), Martha and her husband, Alexander Bernhard (with whom she had three sons), were members of the Ipswich Group, a conga-line of swingers and swappers in Ipswich, Massachusetts, who were making the most of the sexual revolution while they were still limber and could afford ...”

“... opinion in the West did better than this. Among journalists, the Washington Post correspondents Peter Baker and Susan Glasser have produced a hard-hitting survey of the new Russia, Kremlin Rising, that puts the palliators of the Financial Times to shame.2 Among historians, Richard Pipes, at one with Malia in hostility to Communism, but in temperament and ...”

“... flow by; a long night of chaos and desolation will pass. Those resonant, vatic words come from Alexander Herzen, the Russian democratic exile, and he wrote them shortly after the failure of the 1848 Revolutions in Europe. The old empires had reasserted control. But Herzen knew that 1848 spelled their ultimate doom, even though it was not to come for ...”

“... of racism until the news reports of the Fifties and Sixties confronted them with it. Professor Alexander Bickel of the Yale Law School wrote that television coverage of mob resistance to school desegregation brought concretely home to viewers what the abstract idea of racial segregation meant, ‘Here were grown men and women,’ he said, ‘furiously ...”

“... means abundantly – funded. It is a sobering but incontrovertible conclusion to be drawn from Peter Hill’s two television series, Rough Justice and More Rough Justice, that to put right what the courts and the Home Office between them have got wrong can require the budgetary as well as the investigative resources of Granada or the BBC on a major ...”

“... in his youth. The partnership has inspired plays and novels, from Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist to Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr Dee. Its apotheosis, in this picaresque sense, is the notorious occasion at Trebon Castle in southern Bohemia, when the spirits revealed to Kelley their wish that he and Dee should ‘hold their wives in common’. That Jane Dee ...”

“... such as the US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Trump’s favourite economic adviser, Peter Navarro, the question is why the effort to enrol China in the world economy was undertaken in the first place, and who benefited from an experiment that has gone so badly wrong.The crude Trumpian take, which is perhaps also the kindest, is that the US ...”

“... most of which would have been to pay for continuous care. Ledwidge also tells the story of ‘Peter’, who served with him in the same reservist unit. A talented linguist, physically fit and a promising commander, he was seen as an ideal candidate for special forces, but was seriously injured in a bomb attack in 2006. The MoD told him, wrongly, that as a ...”

“... writer’, and he cut some contributions by more than half. One enemy he certainly made was Alexander Balloch Grosart DD, who was invited to contribute several entries for the first volumes, principally on 17th-century divines. As early as October 1883, Stephen was complaining that he had ‘had my usual letter of abuse from that old fool ...”

“... held belief they encountered was that fairies were fallen angels. In Shetland, the folklorist Alexander Carmichael was told that the angels who fell to earth became fairies while those who fell into the sea became seals. Because they were not human they were excluded from salvation, and when they attempted the Lord’s Prayer could only ever say: ‘Our ...”

“... by a scholar leans towards ‘the Muse’ and away from the facts of History. There is a sense (as Peter Ackroyd cogently observed in his Life of Eliot) in which every literary biography is something of a tightrope-walk between these two poles: a sense in which, that is, all biographies are really re-interpretations on the part of each individual biographer of ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”