“... met Princess Margaret ... yet?’ At Quentin’s we grew used to finding Koestler, Bernard Levin, Peter Sellers, Ken Tynan, Keith Richards – but none of these quite counted as in her league. As Quentin observes here, with a pretence of puzzlement, ‘even in supposedly relaxed and liberal circles, very few managed to behave normally with ...”

“... 2012. Yet the red curtain behind her support act was quivering with activity. The audience rose to their feet. No one around me was thinking about 2012, when Whitney had spent her last day loading up on cocaine, Xanax and whatever else you can find before an awards show in LA. Those were details from a world that wasn’t believed to hold the ...”

“... read. To this day, many Glaswegians would agree.In 2022 a London-based urban designer called Peter Kelly set up a campaign group called Replace the M8. Kelly believes there is a nostalgia for ‘the completeness of the 19th-century city’. What does he want? Tunnels, he says, though he is aware that some cultural revolutionaries want anything resembling ...”

“... and those of Eden and Macmillan. The new monetarism was brought to England from America by Mr Peter Jay, but politically the beginning of monetarism can be dated from Sir Keith Joseph’s Preston speech of 5 September 1974. The key sentence in that speech was: ‘it is the method that successive governments have used to reduce registered unemployment ...”

“... and the defeated Jews that the Christians began to assert themselves. In the generation after Peter and Paul met their deaths in Rome under Nero, the gospel narratives and the Book of Acts took shape and found readers. By the end of the reign of Domitian, John had composed the Book of Revelation and targeted the Whore of Babylon. The Flavian house of ...”

“... depends on their rivers and mountains, frontiers and coastlines. In The Earth Transformed (2023), Peter Frankopan added climate to the list: drought in Central Asia caused the fall of empires in Europe, and the Little Ice Age did the same for the Ming dynasty in China. Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History (2023) studied plagues and their ...”

“... Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth Network, which, since its founding in 1986 in Louvain, has been the main body studying and advocating for ...”

“... so reveals that our sense of ourselves as simply a woman or a man is, in the words of Jacqueline Rose, ‘the outcome of multiple repressions whose unlived stories surface nightly in our dreams’. The trans person is the chimera we all desire and dread.It is no surprise, then, that the increasing visibility of trans life has led to the reassertion of sex as ...”

“... not only the improvement of biographical fact but the artistic shaping of it. No one would accuse Peter Gwyn, author of The King’s Cardinal, of confusing life with art. His intentions are too austere to risk that imputation. Although his important and very long book proclaims itself a ‘biography’ of Thomas Wolsey, it fulfils few of the expectations ...”

“... itself an event – even without the BBC’s extraordinary graphics and the mobile enthusiasm of Peter Snow.’ Now, it’s not especially surprising that the deputy leader of a historic social-democratic party should open an article with a sentence that reads as if hastily translated from the Albanian, or that he should close that article without a single ...”

“... where, among others regularly passing the (obligatory) potatoes, were Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Lincoln Kirstein and Gipsy Rose Lee. When love comes to the confirmed bachelor old friends find it difficult to take. Chums winced to see T.S. Eliot spooning with wife No 2, smirked when they ...”

“... be avoided if one changes the question from an analytical one to a historical one. Six years ago, Peter Flora and Arnold Heidenheimer’s The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America shifted attention away from the conditions of the Seventies to the possible origins of those conditions over the course of the 20th century.2 Douglas Ashford’s The ...”

“... Tynan was the first, and flamboyantly the foremost, of their number. In fact, his father Sir Peter Peacock, chairman of the family chain of Midland drapery stores, could easily have sent him to a public school, and wished to. But his mother, Letitia Rose Tynan, feared that if he left home, he might discover his ...”

“... a ‘legendary period in movies’. In The Last Picture Show, Welles’s friend and protégé Peter Bogdanovich had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of ...”

“... by many chess prodigies. His trajectory was extraordinary. In a single year, his Elo rating rose from 904 – only slightly better than moving the pieces at random – to 1907, enough to be among Norway’s top four hundred or so players. When he was 12, his father requested a year’s leave of absence to take him on a chess-playing tour of ...”