“... Durrell’s Quinx or The Ripper’s Tale concludes a sequence consisting of Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness, Livia or Buried Alive, Constance or Solitary Practices and Sebastian or Ruling Passions. This series of novels-with-two-titles, containing characters with variable names and fluctuating identities, is (as we should expect) suffused with ...”

“... get his son Timothy a place at the university. Not only was he ‘disgusted’ to see an African prince introduced as ‘Your Highness’ at an All Souls reception, his attempts to predispose a Lincoln don in his son’s favour were snubbed. ‘This sort of thing upsets me,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘After all I have got a certain standing.’ No wonder ...”

“... compatriots. In Rome, Catholic priests formed part of the British colony, the genial Scot Peter Grant being ‘an agreeable companion to everybody’ and the Jesuit John Thorpe acting as an agent for the purchase of works of art. Father Thorpe commissioned paintings and furnishings for the chapel of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, a unique surviving ...”

“... seen’. He describes the debris of recent camps – spent ammunition, tins of evaporated milk and Prince Albert crimpcut tobacco, used torch batteries ‘in clusters like animal droppings’. He writes of ‘a heedless imposition on the land and on the people, a rude invasion’. He raises the spectres of oil blowouts, pollution from mine tailings, the ...”

“... and from above, the yard is one of those places where the city’s built environment seems to peter out and go to seed; though crossed by fences and framed by the sides of buildings, it seems indifferent to any formal order. Fried speaks of a ‘sense of makeshiftness, of an entire environment having been put together, constructed, not in a spirit of ...”

“... Express foresaw Betjeman’s likely role as poet laureate and commissioned him to write a poem on Prince Andrew’s birth in 1960. Following a slim volume of poetry, High and Low (1966), which initially he had been reluctant to publish for fear of more unpleasant reviews, came his 1969 knighthood and then in 1972 the royal appointment, though its ...”

“... Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden ...”

“... mannequin in the Bill Clinton or Felipe González mould – or even a mixture of Billy Graham and Prince Charles. Initially, he seemed prepared to give Blair a chance, comparing him favourably with Keir Hardie – a Benn family hero whose biography Caroline wrote in 1992. But once Blair began to include Lloyd George in the Labour Party’s radical ...”

“... system led not only to unnecessary delay but also to unsatisfactory compromises.In Cabinet (1986) Peter Hennessy records that, under Mrs Thatcher, ‘cabinet does meet less frequently, it discusses fewer formal papers, it is presented with more virtual faits accomplis at the last moment, and she does prefer to work in ad hoc groups – many of the most ...”

“... Governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw sees her first ghost, that of the wicked valet Peter Quint, the words she uses to describe the event – which initially persuades her that her ‘imagination’ has ‘turned real’, in the person of her handsome employer – are words in which Hamlet is remembered. ‘It was plump, one afternoon, in the ...”

“... reminiscences over the teacups. The story that Mai Zetterling told of her encounter with Peter Sellers and Kingsley Amis, at the time of the filming of Only Two Can Play, moves easily enough from life to fiction. ‘Want to see my Aertexes?’ asks the disgraceful Rex Martin, the Amis offprint. What happens is that world fits within world like a ...”

“... a secular one, and represents nothing more than the religious yearning of a non-religious age. Peter Ackroyd’s dignified, often eloquent biography offers a picture of More which is a combination of Catholic admiration and scholarly determinism. Ackroyd has soaked himself in late medieval history; happily, he does not pretend to conduct a historical ...”

“... Jewish merchants of Baghdad. Siegfried’s great-great-grandfather Sasson Ben Saleh was the last Prince of the Captivity at the Caliph’s court, and before moving to England the family had been the leading merchants in Bombay, where their great charitable monuments still stand. But Siegfried’s father, Alfred, had been disowned by his mother when he ...”

“... These two books are a reminder that architects do usually test their ideas on themselves first. Peter Moro, who worked for Lubetkin’s practice and designed the Royal Festival Hall’s interiors, was introduced to Greenwich and Blackheath after the war by a pupil, the architect and local resident Trevor Dannatt. Moro was so impressed that he moved to a ...”

“... Empson’s summer absence at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up Empson’s spare and insufficiently dramatic verse with ‘alchemical mumbo-jumbo’; the composer Gilbert Kennedy ensured the ...”