“... friend called Jane all his life. ‘I don’t think he had the faintest idea what laundry was,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘He put it into this basket and it came back from Jane immaculately laundered.’ After he left school, his father took a piece of sculpture – a sandstone horse, almost two feet high, ‘three legs serving convincingly as four’ – that ...”

“... with Elizabeth Taylor. But her place in the sun came with His Way: The Unauthorised Biography of Frank Sinatra, which raised Sinatra’s hoodlum status to the point where she was sued for two million dollars. Sinatra dropped the action, and Kelley’s book went to number one, but she was now singled out as an author who would reach for the very ceiling of ...”

“... within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty ...”

“... to undervalue Britain’s musical heritage. Among the members of his own circle, composers such as Peter Warlock, Alan Rawsthorne, Berners, even to some extent Walton have faded well beyond their worth. Lloyd plainly considers Lambert a significant composer, but he doesn’t argue the case in any very material or persuasive way, and he hardly even attempts to ...”

“... turn of Joan Littlewood at Stratford East and George Devine at the Royal Court. In recent years, Peter Brook has taken up the baton in Stratford and in Paris. All of them demonstrated, implicitly or explicitly, that the theatre is an art, a forum, a faith, something to be fought for. At the Royal Court George Devine instilled a system of values that gave the ...”

“... with ‘I may be gone for some time.’ Roth’s titles have often teased with implied offers of frank confession: Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is ...”

“... migration to the mode of Helliconia Spring, his first Tolkienian novel. The novelist is always frank about his ambitions. He is quite prepared to take advantage of a handy centenary to compare his work to Joyce’s, as he did in print a few weeks ago. In a recklessly chin-leading pre-publication advertisement for Helliconia Spring, entitled ‘The Making ...”

“... In any case, Reid made his disagreements with Hutcheson explicit in his lectures at Glasgow: see Peter Kivy’s edition of Thomas Reid’s Lectures on the Fine Arts (1973). The conclusion is inescapable: either Jefferson changed his mind or he never noticed the problem. There is no evidence that he changed his mind, and it turns out that what Wills has ...”

“... will be curable in the context of our boundless longevity?When do you stop being who you are?For Peter Pan, death was an awfully big adventure. For Saul Bellow, it was the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.‘Nothing good ever really dies,’ a middle-aged man told me in the drinks queue at Abba Voyage in Stratford. ‘It just ...”

“... the city remains firmly in the background; more strikingly, a recent book about the young Joyce by Peter Costello, which ends in 1914, provides much valuable new material about his Dublin background and youth but devotes only sixty of nearly four hundred pages to his time in Trieste. This has not gone unnoticed in Joyce’s temporarily adopted city. A map ...”

“... This process has enriched our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the ...”

“... Most men when? Enright’s review begins (a hilarious category mistake) by comparing Nabokov to Peter De Vries: ‘whereas De Vries despairs of his fellow beings without ceasing to love them altogether ...’ My pop-eyed italics. The friend of the world is nigh. But love is an exclusive emotion. Loving mankind is a logical contradiction, produced by too ...”

“... determined to tear up the weedy old turf. Scargill, Benn, Ken Livingstone, even the pathetic Peter Tatchell, are harassed and hounded with a venom and persistence which have no justification and no precedent. Well, perhaps one precedent. When the right-wing press launched the New Bullying some ten years ago by encouraging citizens to take private ...”

“... direct ‘sensuous’ enjoyment and the central means to political understanding and intervention. Peter Brook once said he himself had no sense of history as a reality: ‘History to me is a way of looking at things, and-not one that interests me very much’; the artist’s vision is concerned with the present. This view, whatever may be said for it, is very ...”

“... unprepossessing as my own.’ Evelyn Waugh being ‘our valued friend’, ‘it amused me to hear Peter laughing at Evelyn’s “provincial little Arnold Bennett arriviste appearance”.’ If Chelsea (and Oxford) might be at odds with Bloomsbury (and Cambridge) for territorial competitive reasons, the two were at one when it came to making bad ...”