“... his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost circle of the school’. However, as Peter Campbell wrote in the LRB (3 February 2011), English painters ‘responded to Impressionism’s escape from the academic into the everyday, but made something tighter and darker of it. The French pleasure in picnics and river parties and weather wasn’t ...”

“... It was​ in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950 ...”

“... came crossly down to find that she was right, only in those days the birds were peacocks from the Hall. Today the pheasants don’t hang about, two of them skidding down the sloping roof of the hut like ski jumpers and launching themselves into space before stepping fastidiously round the garden expecting to be fed. 16 July. A book review in the LRB by ...”

“... rather than later?15 July 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a lifelong friend of Peter’s from their time together at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle and now himself Hon. Mr Justice Potts of the Queen’s Bench ...”

“... interventions produced such enormous results that, by 1983, the then minister for agriculture, Peter Walker, was able to claim that the UK was now 75 per cent self-sufficient in temperate foodstuffs and, more remarkable still, according to the boast of the Conservative Campaign Guide that year, 100 per cent self-sufficient in wheat.Free trade zealots ...”

“... what the essayist principally intended. By contrast, when Philip Larkin reviews in 1959 Iona and Peter Opie’s Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, one is distracted from the just and necessary points that Larkin has to make, by the elaboration or further definition of the Larkin persona as ‘a man who hates children’ (who by that token, as W.C. Fields ...”

“... of the House of Commons were in revolt, and early in 1986 she was forced to resign in favour of Mr Peter Walker. Traditional “one nation” Toryism reasserted itself.’ The third. ‘The second Thatcher Government set about establishing a police state and mounted savage attacks on socialist local authorities and militant unions like the mine-workers. The ...”

“... 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship between guide and history. Peter Cunningham had followed his guide to Westminster Abbey of 1842 with a two-volume historical Handbook of London, which went through two editions in 1849-1850. It was an outstanding work and H.B. Wheatley based his London Past and Present on it in ...”

“... scorn. Thus, when the headless chicken stuff was going on, or when the Tories wrapped the Albert Hall in a blue ribbon, it was hard not to hope that our disdainful visitor was spending the day somewhere else. But where? On every side, there seems to be some Toytown farce in progress. What, for instance, would Gore make of Christine Hamilton? What would he ...”

“... includes open spaces, small spaces, avocados, tall escalators, flying, social kissing and the Blue Peter theme music. But reviewing Christopher’s List of Behavioural Problems, I decided he’d probably be even worse to live with than I am (Christopher, among other things, likes not to talk to people for a long time, not to eat or drink anything for a long ...”

“... began by acknowledging the ‘curiosity aroused in me by Tennyson’s Maud and Locksley Hall, ostensibly dramatic poems which were strangely flawed, I always felt, by some hidden emotional connection with the poet’s own life. What was it?’ It was, Rader discovered, the steamy psycho-sexual drama of Tennyson’s premarital affair with Rosa ...”

“... is at present something of a fashion for novels reflecting other novels, ironically and obliquely (Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire of London comes to mind, with Little Dorrit behind it; or even Flaubert’s Parrot, though biography, fiction and all inform that eccentric piece of writing). These, at best, are neither extensions nor offshoots, but playful and ...”

“... hold casual buffets rather than dinner parties. In Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), utopia is a country mansion in Cornwall, an anodyne English pastoral in which female midgets play the harpsichord and tend the shrubberies. For the English the ideal society needs to have an old orchard and a couple of herbaceous borders. The Life ...”

“... Melbourne tram downtown, stopping only to glance in a bookseller’s window. It was good to see Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore holding its place in the bestseller list. 1 A good cop yarn set in Victoria, stylistically it is West Coast American, and has been received well there. But that’s not why it’s so popular here. The book sets out to ...”

“... on her ankles, knobs of white nerve poke up. You could hear the dressing changes coming down the hall by the screams, she says. We lean in the doorway, then one by one sit down at the kitchen table to listen. I have no soles to my feet, she begins again.PaolaLunch with Paola has the looseness of night, everything loose and running around a bit. She is ...”