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“... met, Jack Edge,’ Binding drifts dangerously close to the mythical bucolic never-never land of Peter Ackroyd’s English Music. He shares with Ackroyd a love of music-hall, or its wilder sibling, the Punch and Judy show. On one level, that is what A Perfect Execution is. An exhibition in a tent or a glass box at the end ...”

“... who had trained with Adolf Loos, designed the spartan interior. There was a large lecture hall cum waiting-room, with dark wooden floors, a blackboard and forty chairs; four consulting rooms led off it through soundproofed double doors, and were tastefully furnished with heavy drapes, portraits of Freud and a simple cane couch. One patient was struck ...”

“... and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last year, each time gathering in new collections and ...”

“... Does Peter Lake​ ever sleep? Even at 666 pages this is not the longest of his books, which descend on the study of the decades around 1600 like a great waterfall. There are no signs of fatigue, no inanimate sentences. Behind the loosely conversational manner of his prose lies a precision of thought and structure ...”

“... real world and an ideal alternative. Both Jack Zipes’s The Wounded Storyteller and Peter Wortsman’s ‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny include translations of ‘The Sandman’, Hoffmann’s most famous text. ‘The Sandman’, the ur-text on the Doppelgänger, has been the object of a dizzying number of readings, among them ...”

“... the moment when the narrator suggests that the ending of the Odyssey is no ending at all. As Edith Hall writes in The Return of Ulysses, Homer’s story has proved particularly attractive material for a postwar Europe trying to come to terms with the violence of its own history.1 Hans Erich Nossack is just one German writer who made the Odyssey his base for ...”

“... anniversary of the ceremony at which the Queen inaugurated the flow of electricity from Calder Hall on the north-west coast of England, acclaimed internationally as the world’s first nuclear power station. Three decades later, 391 power reactors are operating in 26 countries, supplying 265,000 megawatts of electricity. In some countries, notably ...”

“... commerce meant that while Ibsen and Shaw were transforming British drama, it was Charley’s Aunt, Peter Pan and The Scarlet Pimpernel that played to packed houses. Yet there was also Boucicault and, at the end of the century, Wilde. The theatres themselves were designed in a style for which McWilliam has coined the apt term Populist Palatial. Almost the only ...”

“... the publication day of her memoir – Nicola Sturgeon was interviewed by Kirsty Wark in the McEwan Hall in Edinburgh. Sturgeon was wearing a red top and red shoes: she wears red on days she needs to feel in control. But the audience members didn’t want to tell her off, rather to thank her for ‘all you’ve done for Scotland’. For a woman who thought ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”

“... watch it, will find himself taken up by the Modern Painters crowd, the disciples of the late Peter Fuller. As a high-profile poet with atrophied tastes, he can expect a commission to do something tasteful on Glynn Williams. The Commander has become the ashy residue of Neo-Romanticism, out there in the Fens, a John Piper with backbone, silhouetted against ...”

“... Odysseus’ behaviour the night before he slaughters his wife Penelope’s suitors, which Peter Green translates like this: As a man cooking a paunch chockful of fat and blood on a fierce blazing fire will turn it to and fro, determined to get it cooked through as fast as he can, so Odysseus tossed this way and that, trying to work out how he was ...”

“... In New York, these tensions are deeply rooted. In the 1830s, when the Irish took over Tammany Hall, one of the most keenly debated policy battles was over the abolition of slavery. Daniel O’Connell told his fellow countrymen in America that slavery was a ‘foul blot on the noble institutions’ of their adopted land. The Liberator exhorted ...”

“... be construed as the man who tipped off Burgess and Maclean for their getaway on 25 May 1951? Peter Wright, of course, is convinced that he was Roger Hollis, Deputy Director-General and then Director-General of British counter-intelligence. But he, too, loses himself in the wilderness of mirrors, and Spycatcher for me does not prove the case. Mr ...”