“... usually explain the set-up early and clearly. The game can’t start until you know the rules. Peter Carter, falling to earth in his burning plane, accepts his designated death, but falls in love with the radio operator June and thereby somehow falls past it. The rest of A Matter of Life and Death follows from this anomalous case of physical (rather than ...”

“... prose, his idea of freedom ceases to be urbane and becomes temporarily romantic and Wordsworthian. Peter Ackroyd is aware of Wilde’s relation to the Young Ireland movement, and in his fictional account of Wilde’s last months in Paris he makes a courageous attempt to align his subject with the Irish libertarian tradition. Wilde’s enemies ‘mocked me also ...”

“... over, he says no. There is a fabled long version of Apocalypse Now – almost six hours – which Peter Cowie reports on in his lively and compendious The Apocalypse Now Book, from which I have taken many of the quotations in this piece, although I also learned a lot from Eleanor Coppola’s Notes (1979), and from Fax Bahr’s documentary Hearts of Darkness ...”

“... as does his first commercial success, the coloured woodcut of Queen Victoria with walking cane and Skye terrier. It was made for her Diamond Jubilee, though William Heinemann, who eventually published it, initially objected that Victoria, dome-shaped in black with a white feathered bonnet, looked like a tea cosy. By 1897 the ‘Good Queen and ...”

“... them difficult to spot from the air.This slow progress allowed my father, Territorial Army Captain Peter Raban of (to give his full address) ‘A’ Troop, 265 Battery, 67th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, to spend much of 21 January putting the finishing touches to an unusually long and well-thought-out letter to my mother, which reads as if he put it ...”

“... of linguistic invention. Dovlatov’s style, especially his humour, depends on the ways Russian cane to be used in the Soviet Union after decades of repression, deprivation and ritualised government jargon. For Dovlatov, camp slang was poetry. Deprived of nearly everything, the prison inmates, or ‘zeks’, devoted their attention to words. The Zone, a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... double doors, and were tastefully furnished with heavy drapes, portraits of Freud and a simple cane couch. One patient was struck by the apparent lack of medical paraphernalia and walked out disappointed, muttering: ‘No ultraviolet lamps?’ Eitingon, who came from a wealthy family of fur traders, underwrote the cost of the clinic (he had already assumed ...”

“... Waugh, as his last stories reveal, could not do without his Ambrose Silks and Agatha Runcibles and Peter Pastmasters. But one must not press the analogy too far. Waugh did become interested in himself as a literary model – very much so – and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a masterpiece of self-portraiture, one of the very best in English fiction. Even so ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... they were so much cleverer than the Romans, but they never told the Romans this.’ (That is in Peter Clarke’s book.) He won’t have been serious; but the levity of the remark suggests that the fall of the empire wasn’t upsetting him too much. The inevitability of the end of empire was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save ...”

“... seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter Matthiessen was at work on his account of it? ‘These doggedly independent men,’ he tells us, ‘do not speak of themselves as “working”, far less “taking a job”.’ He quotes one of the younger generation: ‘Fishin wasn’t a job, it was your ...”

“... be discovered. My first encounter was a series of debates at the back of the football bus in which Peter Ustinov took on Ribbentrop’s son on the justice of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A few months later, these ideas, and other ideas – Surrealism, colloquial poetry, and the new architecture – were everywhere. There was a new dawn, but a dawn forced on by ...”

“... as he was always known – was born, the family lived in a grand house near Chalfont St Peter. But Charles wasn’t a successful doctor; his ambitions seem to have been more as an inventor. At one point he tried to interest the Post Office in a phone box that locked you in if you rang the emergency services (this was meant to deter hoax ...”

“... with a bright blue paisley 1960s top; a Victorian upholstered chair sat next to a glass and cane coffee table. But now it’s clear: the schoolgirl skirt and the Victorian chair belonged to her marriage, and the silken paisley and cane coffee table to her new life.Sylvia considered some sort of open marriage, but felt ...”