“... how Jonathan Power tells it. Amnesty began in 1961, with the simple and apparently absurd idea of Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, that governments could be persuaded to release political prisoners simply by ordinary people writing letters to them. This remains the core of Amnesty’s work. Power’s is not an uncritical history. He refers both to the ...”

“... evolutionism of Lamarck. The point that Desmond brings out so well – drawing on the work of Martin Rudwick, Peter Bowler and Michael Bartholomew – is that Darwin’s Origin of Species actually caught Huxley on the wrong foot. If the future of scientific naturalism was, after all, to be bound up with an evolutionary ...”

“... about the early days of Motley. They had taken as a studio Chippendale’s old workshop behind St Martin’s Lane, where a gang of actors, led by Gielgud, could generally be found sitting around, gossiping, discussing productions and having tea. With a tea bill that sometimes came to £100 a week, it sounds cosy, cliquey and not the stuff of theatrical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... doesn’t mention that they also brought six goshawks, two horses, four falcons, ‘one living martin’ (presumably as opposed to the dead furs), one crane and – mysteriously – two pelicans. The pelicans were kept in the king’s menagerie in St James’s Park, where three years later John Evelyn ‘examined the Throate of the Onocratylus or Pelecan ...”

“... force, and the Thatcherites were troubled by the ongoing costs of a fortified, garrisoned Ulster. Peter Brooke, who became Northern Ireland secretary in 1989, initiated the tortuously slow pavane that led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, with a speech in November 1990 in which he announced that ‘the British government has no selfish strategic or ...”

“... way be about him – which shuffles in on the guest-list a piece, for example, on Lost Highway, Peter Guralnick’s book about country music. Every so often Marcus extends the rubric: ‘Because of Elvis’s arrival, because of who he was and what he became, because of his event and what we made of it, the American past, from the Civil War to the civil ...”

“... as one of the first volumes of the complete works of George Orwell, for which the editor, Dr Peter Davison, uses Orwell’s original manuscripts, letters and proofs to establish the text that Orwell would have wished to have. In the case of this work, among the most personal and directly political of Orwell’s writings, he has made particular use of the ...”

“... she encountered that she feared their matches would never strike on her box. My dear old friend Peter Bull, much-missed these days, once had me watching him in Waiting for Godot. I left at half-time under the impression that he didn’t speak in Act Two. ‘What made you think that?’ he demanded when next we met. ‘I thought that was what you ...”

“... the portraits of two paramilitary schemers, antagonists who resemble one another: the devout Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein/IRA and the devout Peter Robinson, a Loyalist leader who has gained in clout since the programme. There will be those who think that the new Robinson is partly due to the fact that, in the ...”

“... drag, both of Willie’s Cumberland balls are on pawn in her handbag, and as for your boss little Peter, he’s rushing off to kiss the great Nigerian arse.’ The real problem for a novelist comes with the cast of living public figures firmly under the protection of the English libel law. Clearly, to write a documentary novel about the British Left and its ...”

“... advanced Protestant ideas propagated by John Cheke, master of King’s and tutor to Edward VI, and Martin Bucer, the Strasbourg theologian and Regius Professor of Divinity in Edwardian Cambridge, as well as by his years in Basel, where English exiles gathered during the reign of Mary I. There he shared lodgings with the martyrologist John Foxe in a former ...”

“... and Melopotamos, who had said that he was either a knave or a fool for sounding a bit like Martin Luther on justification. It is amazing that anything got done at all, and indeed more than once the whole event nearly ended in disarray. For some of the period covered by the council’s gestation and deliberations, the pope was formally at war with ...”

“... local vicar must have been as entertaining as it was scandalous and shocking. Thirty years later, Peter Vavasour from Yorkshire was prosecuted by the High Commission for similarly provocative words about the Christian doctrine of life after death. ‘Tush tush,’ he declared. ‘That is but a tricke of the clergye, to cause the people to beleeve … to gett ...”

“... which they recognised would not deliver what they had fought for within the foreseeable future. Martin McGuinness, who was once portrayed as the ‘hawk’ to Adams’s ‘dove’ and whispered to be his deadly rival – in fact the two men enjoy a close and easy-going friendship – has said the same thing in recent interviews. There seems little reason to ...”