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“... For us​ ,’ Steffen Ahrends told his son Peter, who was born in Berlin in 1933, ‘the history of architecture started with the Soviet 1917 revolution.’ It wasn’t entirely a joke. For many designers in the Weimar Republic, and for subsequent generations of modernist hardliners, 1917 had made possible a reconstruction of life on collective, egalitarian and, above all, planned lines ...”

“... school. Selling Russian cars on the US market. I’m trying to get Bill Clinton involved in a green project converting waste to energy: a friend of a friend was at college with Hillary.’ Everyone you meet in Little Russia seems to have another business on the side. At the Cosmos party, doctors I talked to turned out to have a line in real estate; the ...”

“... and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.’ It is in pursuit of such myths that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda set out for the promised land; they learn the realities of life in the colony the hard way. Carey set himself against Dickens more explicitly nine years later, in Jack Maggs (1997), an imaginative reworking of Great ...”

“... not an academic, thinks otherwise. His life of Dickens opens with the great man dead, lying on the green sofa in the dining-room of Gad’s Hill Place. But Ackroyd does not regard his subject across any fence: he knows Dickens as intimately as the man knew himself; better, perhaps, since Dickens was not great on self-knowledge. There are no lost keys, no ...”

“... Big City is strikingly similar to 1890s Fin de Siècle, if one replaces absinthe with cocaine, green daffodils and velvet with leather skirts from Fiorucci and Kamali silk tops, Paris with Manhattan or Los Angeles. McInerney’s decadents wear designer clothes. They run up monthly phone bills of 1300 dollars and daily coke bills that are scarcely ...”

“... course, which was a burden on everybody, despite the cartoons and all that guff, the play starring Peter O’Toole. Bernard was a nasty, jealous misogynist who found a perfect safe house at the Colony: so many of its regulars were nasty that your average woman-hater struggled to stand out. (He was also a ponce who stole people’s returns from the betting ...”

“... in 1867. Prometheus in fleshy earthenware sprawled on the gleaming turquoise dome of the lid. A green-gold eagle perched on his thigh and belly, and tore at his crimson liver. The tall handles were blond-bearded chained Titans in mail shirts. A vase here sounds much like a stage set, or even the performance of a play. When, a few pages later, in this same ...”

“... figures to lend him a cloak of respectability. Figures such as Haines, Bernard Donoughue and Peter Jay, the former British ambassador in Washington – some of the stars of the Labour governments of the 1970s – were happy to be signed up to Maxwell’s payroll. The case of Haines was especially striking: when Maxwell bought the Mirror, in 1984, Haines ...”

“... would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter Porter. He was an Australian immigrant in London, and had written a lot of poems, but published relatively few; she was a nurse who seemed ‘very English’ in accent and tastes, and was admired for having a figure like a ballet dancer. They set up home ...”

“... Paton Walsh decided to publish the novel in Britain herself, using her small personal imprint of Green Bay Books, and backed up with marketing and distribution by Colt Books of Cambridge, who initially approached HMC to handle the account. Joint Managing Director Julia Hobsbawm says: ‘The book presented us with an unmissable PR challenge: to get attention ...”

“... of black and white and golden-brown clothing, and with the red of wine or cherries and the fresh green of vine leaves – all contained originally (as early inventories invariably indicate) by black frames. But when commissioned to paint larger and more complex narratives he abandoned this luminous clarity, darkening his pictures so that the space and the ...”

“... Lord Byron’), ‘Paul’s Tattoo’ (alluding to ‘Tattoos’ in James Merrill’s sequence ‘Peter’), ‘An Island Sheaf’ (alluding to Hart Crane’s Key West: An Island Sheaf), ‘Summer Landscape’, ‘Lily and Bronze’, ‘After the Fourth’, ‘American Sublime’ (alluding to Stevens’s ‘The American Sublime’). Even Doty’s cleverest ...”

“... whose circumscription we may set All solitudes of love, room for love’s face, Love’s projects green with leaves, Love’s monuments like tombstones on our lives. ‘The Broken Bowl’ typifies the meretricious humourlessness of Merrill’s early poetry. The later work has none of this menacing generality, and the paralysing cast of the grand style is ...”

“... argued that that a second resolution would be required – as had the attorney general, Sir Peter Goldsmith. Tony Blair himself had tried to secure a second resolution. But then, just as the negotiations for a second resolution – handled by Greenstock – failed, the attorney general changed his view, declaring that Resolution 1441 itself revived the ...”

“... Although it sets out to explore the lives of Fred and Rosemary West – along with Peter Sutcliffe, the most notorious figures in recent British criminal history – Happy like Murderers reads more like a novel than a documentary. In this respect, it recalls Truman Capote’s ‘novel of fact’, In Cold Blood, which made compelling fiction out of the brutal and senseless murder of an apparently typical American family in rural Kansas, and created a new genre on the way ...”