“... met a single policeman who remembers stopping anyone for stealing an apple. Like Dixon of Dock Green, the cheerful Bobby who was always around the place when any trouble broke out, and whatever the temptation was fair, even-handed and cheerful, it is part all a mirage of the good old days – which were, in fact, bad. There has nonetheless been a decisive ...”

“... the United States was committed to this view of the matter well before it gave Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait. Nor does his exorbitant interpretation of that green light make a settlement of the Palestinian question, or the suddenly-discovered problem of nuclear proliferation, for that matter, any less ...”

“... field studies. Over a period of forty years beginning in 1973, the Princeton biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant studied the seed-eating ground finches on a small island in the Galapagos, noting the ways in which year by year changes in the weather pattern, from heavy rainfall to drought, drove changes in body and beak size in the ...”

“... of the early Seventies. Several of the players – Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter, Johnny Giles, Peter Lorimer, Alan ‘Sniffer’ Clarke – had a lot of ability, but they also tended to have Jekyll-and-Hyde natures, the Hyde component of which their manager, Don Revie, did nothing to suppress. The fact that the most successful team in English football was ...”

“... not only a stunning spatial device, but one which entailed the replication in paint of the antique green marble used for the frame’s frieze. The reflection within the altarpiece itself of luxurious materials used in the church was an important part of the appeal of Bellini’s work and that of his followers. Numerous Venetian altarpieces include the same ...”

“... John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must’). With Auden he went to bed; also, according ...”

“... Brazilian Adventure?’ the young travelogue aspirant ventured to ask, to be crisply told that Peter Fleming’s book had sold as an adventure, not as a book about Brazil. Fleming’s two prewar travel books, the Brazilian one and News from Tartary, which is still better, succeeded so well because their author instinctively took to heart the advice of ...”

“... still produced in Egypt during the Middle Ages, but gradually edged out by parchment and paper. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny in the mid-12th century, saw all three materials as profane surfaces on which to inscribe holy texts: God reads, you say, the book of the Talmud in heaven. If it is the same kind of book as the others we typically read every ...”

“... which has Arabic, Persian and Bengali influences. In his new biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, Peter Popham describes the claims of pre-1784 settlement as ‘specious and confusing’. He doesn’t deny the long presence of Muslims in Arakan, but points to the absence of Rohingya in the censuses conducted by the British from the 1820s. The only recorded ...”

“... a disunited nation, a task force could not have been proposed. Yet Labour had appeared to signal green, before there had been an opportunity for reflection within the Shadow Cabinet as a whole, let alone the Parliamentary Party, or the Party in the country. Had the military occupation taken place on a Monday to Thursday when Parliament was sitting, I believe ...”

“... Strong) to put enough of a dent in multinational budgets to command serious media attention was Peter Ackroyd, a meticulously re-invented Man of Letters. The others, until Ben Watson elbowed his way onto the scene, have had to settle for a succès d’estime, quasi-academic projects with spin (such as the provocative series edited by Denise Riley for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not only on one politician or party, and least of all on the Civil Service and the executive. Peter Jenkins of the Guardian was the first to get it right, when he told a protest rally: ‘This is Parliament’s war!’ The end of the Falklands affair was not difficult to condemn either. The problem of the islands had been rendered far more ...”

“... make the cascade of factual claims in the book – claims that Lovelock uses to disparage ‘green’ policies, such as moves towards renewable sources of energy – feel rather shaky. Since Lovelock introduced the Gaia theory, about forty years ago, our picture of the history of the Earth has become more eventful, less a story of stability and more one ...”

“... will flash by.’ We cut to her point of view and, through the car’s rear window, see the pale green two-storey house receding down the quiet street. Then, unpredictably, we cut to a shot from inside the empty house: through the middle of three tall bay windows, past a green tree overhanging the road, the car can be seen ...”