“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... second time I saw him must have been a few years later at the Mermaid Theatre at a performance of Peter Luke’s play Hadrian VII with Alec McCowen. Then it was his characteristic walk that I noticed: he tripped down the aisle after the designer, Gladys Calthrop, his hands, fingers pressed together, half slipped into his trouser pockets ...”

“... Clodagh Hartley, the Sun’s Whitehall editor, was acquitted over her dealings with Jonathan Hall, an HM Revenue & Customs press officer. Hall, who worked on the law enforcement desk, earned £17,475 over three years for leaking, among other things, the 2010 budget the night before it was delivered to the House of ...”

“... in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have ...”

“... social group, lies over north Norfolk. Eleven miles to the north of Agnew’s house is Holkham Hall, where Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, still owns farmland on the scale of his eponymous Georgian ancestor, the agricultural reformer Coke of Norfolk. Last year the Holkham Farming Company received £183,000 in subsidies; another Holkham enterprise, Holkham ...”

“... only a few months in office. The best account of Putin’s origins in these three books comes from Peter Truscott. He can be an annoying writer, pausing often to puff out his feathers and crow about how well he knows the great and good, or to gloat over the boring protocol details of state visits at which he was present (Truscott was an MEP, with excellent ...”

“... arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something wonderful’. After she ...”

“... The Exorcist, Klute, The Parallax View, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Annie Hall, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands. These are the movies reviewed by Lane that he lists: Indecent Proposal, Sleepless in Seattle, Speed, Wolf, Forrest Gump, Pulp ...”