“... intelligence alliance is Aldrich’s main subject, though the reality comes nowhere near the rose-tinted preview I’ve just given. The marriage took place in the mid-1940s, but the details of the contract are still secret. It is clear, however, that from the start the US wanted Britain not for its mind (those clever code-breakers) but for its ...”

“... hall isn’t surprising. In another sense, it is as astounding as it would be to learn that Sir Peter Tapsell began his career as a plumber’s mate. ‘Whatever gifts my parents passed on to their children,’ Major remarks in My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall, ‘the talent to entertain was not among them,’ which must be one of the ...”

“... and their elegance. Rabies has Louis Pasteur, smallpox has Edward Jenner. Who has heard of Peter Panum? Even the book about the institution where he spent most of his career, S.E. Stybe’s Copenhagen University: Five Hundred Years of Science and Scholarship (1979), while acknowledging his importance as a founder of modern physiology, fails to mention ...”

“... of pleasure? Is our awareness of pain more like listening, or hearing? When you imagine a red rose, how do you know it’s really red, and why might we think that blue is closer to green than red? ‘Say what you really think,’ he told his students, and ‘don’t try to be intelligent.’ The classes often ‘felt like the day of judgment’, as one ...”

“... specific epochs and styles, making it possible to place their characteristic works – whether a rose window or a razored eye – within definite historical bounds. But the terms have also come to designate something far less chronologically precise; like other aesthetic categories – grotesque, macabre, carnivalesque, magical realist – they denote a ...”

“... malt appeared. Clackmannanshire declared. Then Orkney. Then the rest. I went to bed about 3 a.m., rose again at six, by which time it was over: 55 per cent of the voters had left their quiet houses, voted ‘No’, gone home and shut the door. At seven David Cameron was on the radio. He intoned the words ‘our United Kingdom’ so many times I thought I’d ...”

“... often from North London to Sloane Square, walking away from the Royal Court Theatre, rounding Peter Jones on Symons Street and turning up towards Cadogan Square. On entering the house, you rose in a coffin-like lift to the top and walked down to the first half-landing, where the door of her place would be ...”

“... school of regard. Wharton was best known for a column he wrote in the Telegraph under the name ‘Peter Simple’, and he was pleased to see in Hill’s austere lyricism a salutary rejection of vulgar modern mores, so I am not sure what he would have made of ‘Cute, my arse’ – not to mention, from later sections of the poem, ‘a shot of jism’, ‘a ...”

“... on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true vocation and chief talent, and he worked at it tirelessly. The great majority of his numerous poems – he described them, without false modesty, as ...”

“... Mozart has probably suffered more than most from this attention, since the romantic myths that rose around him during the 19th century have proved extraordinarily tenacious. So cliché’d is the sad tale of his last years that we can, aping Humbert Humbert’s laconic account of his mother’s demise – ‘(picnic, lightning)’ – get by with a ...”

“... never can taste the joy of Elysium, because it is a spiritual joy & they cannot perceive it. When Peter Gay wrote about the sensual life of the Victorians, he cited the Hawthornes as an exemplary pair, remarking how their talk of ‘holy’ kisses sanctified their evident delight in the satisfactions of the flesh. But Herbert is more inclined to emphasise the ...”

“... have bought a packet of seeds for every man, woman and child in Iraq. These agricultural credits rose inexorably through the Eighties, until they totalled a thousand million dollars a year. But that was nothing like enough to satisfy Saddam Hussein (or the greed of the people who supplied him). What he wanted was a bank in America with an open and endless ...”

“... its activities, Edward Heath spoke up for it in the House of Commons. In 1969, it was natural that Peter McLachlan, at the time administrator of the NYO and later active at Conservative Central Office, should invite the then Leader of the Opposition to visit the orchestra on its Easter holiday course at a minor public school in Ramsgate, just down the road ...”

“... glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a joiner’s son. We have here a miniature blueprint for late Elizabethan theatrical tastes: Marlowe the tragedian, whose thunderous poetry packed them in at the public theatres; Lyly the author of ...”

“... a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and the European union’. It strikes me that Lake devalues the past, though, when he plays down its connections with ...”