“... currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. This seems to encourage us to view The Waste Land not as a ‘heap of broken images’ or a series of ...”

“... were reconfirmed. Two hundred years after ‘Rule Britannia’ was first performed before the Prince of Wales, Britain once again, in the summer of 1940, proved itself the patron of liberty. New Whig histories (Churchill, Trevelyan) which upheld the myth of Britain’s distinctive tradition of freedom and equipoise sold by the hundred thousand. Orwell, in ...”

“... large in 17th-century thought. Millenarians and Messianists like Isaac La Peyrère, John Dury and Peter Serrarius expected the recall of the Jews to Palestine any minute, where they would rebuild the Temple and set up a government. Arguments about whether they would return as Jews or as converts to Christianity were common. Menasseh ben Israel seemed to ...”

“... a slight resentment towards translations, and in his clever ‘Poem Waiting to be Translated’, Peter Porter asks: Why not remember the heroes of hard situations, those who answered inquisitors in fresh parables, whose lyrical rejoinders are assembled here in memorial Penguins? Porter is glancing at the work of Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, and ...”

“... Russell on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter Thomas on Court and country cultures) is intelligently deployed, but not always searchingly tested against the events Mr Fletcher describes. And Mr Fletcher is careful to warn us that ‘although this book contains a new narrative it is in no sense an ...”

“... and satisfying menu; but the reader who misses the great names of the period should be warned that Peter Eisenman, Richard Rogers, Alvaro Siza, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas (along with the central figure in Barcelona’s historic renewal, Oriol Bohigas) are all represented by substantial essays or interviews. I am not sure whether the distribution of these ...”

“... anybody but their own family’), with the exception of a special few, like the ‘young Qajar prince’ who invited her to fly down to his ‘fabulous Hollywood-style playboy mansion in Isfahan’ for ‘an unexpected exercise in debauchery’. Stein was friends with many Iranian women artists but has little to say about their work or lives. (One ...”

“... personal intimacy in the bulbous nose of Olivares or Robert Cecil’s crooked spine. As a prince of the Church, Richelieu had a head start, and a protected status, and did not need intimacy. But friendship, not necessarily involving intimacy, was essential. In perhaps the most interesting contribution, David Wootton uses Bacon’s essays to suggest ...”

“... urban for its outer-suburban context’. Hatherley is even more ensorcelled by Alison and Peter Smithson’s béton brut behemoth, Robin Hood Gardens in East London (shown above). For him the Smithsons are the real heroes, and a half-century on he reprises Reyner Banham – with dialectical knobs on – by placing them and their fellow New Brutalists ...”

“... travelling in Italy with her parents; he was the family’s doctor in Rome. They had two children, Peter and Malcolm, and remained technically married until his death in 1949, though they spent very little time together and he saw almost nothing of his sons as they were growing up. ‘There seems to have been no question of passionate love on Axel’s ...”

“... right-wing European politicians. Most of those present supported a Hungarian cardinal called Peter Erdo. ‘He’s what we need right now,’ Tim Busch, president of the conservative Napa Institute in California, told the Times. ‘We need someone who can teach clearly and be strong.’ When it came to the cardinals’ vote, Erdo’s case could not have ...”

“... up his sleeve. This was an illusion he encouraged, and there was some pleasure in sharing it. Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and ...”

“... the title Penny Whistles) in 1885, just as Longman’s started serialising his novel Prince Otto. He was ‘peddling in a corner’, he wrote to Edmund Gosse, ‘confined to the house, overwhelmed with necessary work, which I was not always doing well, and, in the very mild form in which the disease approaches me, touched with a sort of bustling ...”

“... the giant panda of Sichuan Province in China. Schaller’s principles and practices inspired Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. He is a big-game biologist, a student of spectacular individuals in nature rather than a toiler at the overlooked and the unindividuated: ‘An animal must provide an emotional experience if I am to involve myself in its ...”

“... in person announcing the passage of 16 years; a second generation, that of Perdita and her prince, Florizel, act out in a summer kingdom a love happier than that of Leontes, a love that through its lesser and more external troubles brings about the moment of discovery as the young lovers take flight back to the Sicilia of Leontes.The play’s peculiar ...”