“... There’s more dash and novelty, but little more analysis, in the treatment accorded P.D. James, Peter Lovesey, Nicholas Freeling, Simenon, Chandler and the husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Only one of the essays seems really ambitious, and the effect, I’m afraid, is comic. Eric Mottram – an otherwise much respected old friend of ...”

“... they have been and remain oppressive, and those – here, primarily theatre practitioners such as Peter Sellars, Anchuli Felicia King and Keith Hamilton Cobb – who still find enabling possibilities in their performance. (Sellars has a fascinating exchange with Ayanna Thompson in which they discuss the paradoxical advantages enjoyed by performances of ...”

“... the Colosseum could accommodate Rome’s entire population twice. The palaces on the Palatine Hill were slowly falling apart; the grand ancient churches served congregations a fraction of their former size. What had once been a metropolis of more than a million inhabitants had shrunk to around thirty thousand.All over Europe buildings stood empty. The ...”

“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... educationalists of the turn of the century. ‘There was something royal in her nature,’ Octavia Hill wrote. There was also a strongly masculine element. She was one of the conspicuous successes of the liberal and unsectarian Bedford College: a brilliant scholar (as well as an expert carpenter) and a supporter of liberal movements – she kept as a souvenir ...”

“... endorses the hyper-sceptical ‘biblical minimalism’ of Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche, which regards such findings as irrelevant since, as they see it, the early history of Israel is actually a fiction that returnees from the Babylonian exile made up after the sixth century BCE. Sand seems unaware of the conflict between the two views ...”

“... describes something astonishing. He writes that the neighbour’s children have come down the hill to the shore, and innumerable tiny fish have arrived in the bay: When I reached the water myself it was like wading in silver treacle; our bare legs pushed against the packed mass of little fish as against a solid and reluctantly yielding obstacle. To scoop ...”

“... was a highly emotional moment: men wept as eight hundred or so Orangemen marched down the Garvaghy hill, past the residents of the Garvaghy Road, who at a given signal removed themselves from the thoroughfare. The RUC had had to decide whether more chaos would result from maintaining the ban than from allowing the Orangemen to march. Some Catholics I know in ...”

“... not only the improvement of biographical fact but the artistic shaping of it. No one would accuse Peter Gwyn, author of The King’s Cardinal, of confusing life with art. His intentions are too austere to risk that imputation. Although his important and very long book proclaims itself a ‘biography’ of Thomas Wolsey, it fulfils few of the expectations ...”

“... reserves of only 8.5 billion to 14 billion barrels. To the companies’ fury, the LSE academic, Peter Odell, argued that this was just an oligopolistic fudge: the true reserves he estimated to be between 78 and 100 billion barrels. In the end this turned out to be far closer to the truth: the early estimates of Brent and Forties both had to be upped ...”

“... Heaney and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, its postwar section makes room for Monty Python but not Geoffrey Hill, or Tony Harrison, or Thom Gunn, or Ted Hughes, or Craig Raine, or James Fenton, or Paul Muldoon, all of whom the Norton squeezes in at the eleventh hour. Ricks, for whom Heaney provides an effective endpoint, is probably right that many anthologies falter ...”

“... and vignettes. ‘I am Mrs Sabawala,’ an Indian admirer announces. ‘My house on Malabar Hill is a sermon in stone. Lunch with me tomorrow.’ He takes part in a gala at the Foreign Office to celebrate the visit of the French President in March 1939: ‘It was a tremendous affair, the last of its kind before the war and I could not help referring to ...”

“... a ‘legendary period in movies’. In The Last Picture Show, Welles’s friend and protégé Peter Bogdanovich had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of ...”

“... AJPT and Lewis, but Bruce McFarlane, John Morris, Rupert Cross, Cyril Darlington, J.Z. Young, Sir Peter Medawar, Gilbert Ryle ... the line stretched on. No doubt it was all more humdrum in reality, but one was left with the impression of great intellectual giants inhabiting a world of mad English eccentricity: an older world of indulgence, scandal, fun and ...”