“... impelled by her upbringing to become a socialist, and even to pass on the contagion to her son – Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International. Her book moves from the site of her father’s first oilfield to the site of her reforming achievements at Marks and Spencer. ‘What were my qualifications?’ she asks in her foreword. ‘A Russian soul, a ...”

“... towards anything that smacks of modernisation. Croucher spies on lovers, dyes his enemies’ milk green, stuffs potatoes up their exhaust pipes: he disguises himself as a pest officer, a Greek Orthodox priest, a knapsacked botanist, a video librarian (who can transform enthusiastic commercials into Buñuel-like fantasies of gluttony and nausea). Croucher ...”

“... from an underground labyrinth full of sepulchres. A centaur levels his arrow at a drowning man. A green devil with six bat’s wings and three gaping mouths clutches a pair of grimacing people. A horned figure labelled ‘Cerbero’, with cloven hooves, swollen balls and blood dripping from his lower jaw, forces two naked people to cower and topple. The ...”

“... that rural nostalgia has been the fuel of British economic decline. One of the many merits of Peter Mandler’s superb study is that it utterly demolishes these assumptions. He shows that, by Continental standards, Britain has been exceptionally slow to protect its country houses. Political intervention has been resisted and commercial development put ...”

“... Aga Khan had fallen in love with its wind-eroded granite shorelines, pink sandy coves and velvety green waters. He and a few investor friends bought 38 miles of coast and 13,000 hectares of land from the daughters of peasants in the area (the sons inherited the more fertile inland plots), hired five architects and built a resort town, Porto Cervo, more easily ...”

“... most famous fool of the Tudor era seems to have arrived at court ‘out of nowhere’, in Peter Andersson’s words. Will Somer, the man who inspired Nashe’s ‘Summers’, was Sexton’s successor: he was taken on sometime before June 1535, when the royal wardrobe accounts first mention a set of new clothes for him, and perhaps as early as a decade ...”

“... 16th, 17th and 18th centuries – was given to the museum by Lady Grantchester, the sister of Sir Peter Moores.To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, Compton Verney has mounted The Reflected Self: Portrait Miniatures, 1540-1850 (until 23 February). Spread across three large rooms, the exhibition tells the story of the portrait miniature in Britain using ...”

“... for Hillinus, a canon of Cologne. The dedication page shows Hillinus presenting the book to St Peter and, above the two men, an accurate image of the old Cologne Cathedral, which was built in the ninth century. (The illustration corresponds to the excavated remains of the foundation walls.) In Constance, the book is open to a full-page illumination of St ...”

“... oaks, larch and pine were chopped down to build ships. Forests became a resource to be managed. Peter I issued scores of decrees designating forests as state reserves; later Catherine the Great, influenced by European practices of forest management, sought to make the extraction of timber rational and sustainable.But even as the tsarist regime sought to ...”

“... vividly in Clarissa’s thoughts on the novel’s opening page, is her old friend and admirer Peter Walsh. In their youth, Peter, too, had been at Bourton, where on a particularly fraught occasion he proposed to her. He’s always felt that she betrayed her best self by settling instead for a cosseted life as Mrs ...”

“... of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an ...”

“... the demotic: fuck, balls, cock, cunt – this is Larkin’s equivalent of dialect. Nowadays Peter Reading is offering something similar, inserting into a great variety of verse-forms a language that is coarse, prosey and, some say, as they at first said about Larkin, scarcely the language of poetry at all. Reading’s vernacular England isn’t to be ...”

“... even more, say, than one of the great social pariahs of our own time, Jean Genet – an outlaw.’ Peter Robb is well aware that it was Caravaggio’s detractors – and chiefly the great theorist and critic Bellori – who associated the dark, dirt and violence of his character and deeds with the subjects and style of his paintings, but Robb’s book provides ...”

“... convenience: ‘restaurants, theatre tickets’. Larsen was born in Chicago in 1891. Her father, Peter Walker, was Black and came from the Danish West Indies; her mother, Marie, was a white Danish immigrant. Walker disappeared soon after Nella’s birth. Her mother then married a fellow Danish immigrant who never accepted his mixed-race stepdaughter. Nella ...”

“... demons of the free market, to the communality of war and the shaky utopianism of Old Labour’s green lungs, swimming-pools and bright new housing projects. King of the City is a very different beast. ‘Believe me, pards,’ it opens, ‘we’re living in an age of myths and miracles.’ (Moorcock, a wily veteran, knows perfectly well, after all those ...”