“... is at once somewhat duller and much more interesting. Duller only in the sense that the black and white clashes of the heroic version cannot survive the exhumation of successive careful Treasury drafts in which the various shades of grey are fastidiously discriminated. More interesting, though, once we can follow the subtlety of a sophisticated argument which ...”

“... and to perform them as well as the big stars in St Louis and Chicago. For the small group of urban white blues fans that grew into a huge audience that remains largely urban and white, he was a bridge in the other direction, taking us from our world into the ‘deep blues’ of the older Delta players. In both cases he ...”

“... kind can be loved and can make you happy. But then Thorson, standing on stage as the driver of the white Rolls-Royce that is also part of the act, and practically a pampered prisoner the rest of the time, can’t enjoy any of this in the way Liberace enjoys his celebrity, long, trailing white fur coat and his own jokes. The ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel is partly a narrative, partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors. It is an important and a depressing book, its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel ...”

“... bowl a long-hop.’ Denis Compton said: ‘He is a yobbo, who was never as good as he thinks.’ Peter May and his selectors refused even to pick Botham for England after the ban had expired. Was all this really because the game had been ‘brought into disrepute’ through Botham’s article on cannabis? Cannabis is illegal, but it is not dangerous, as far ...”

“... later did I attain the standards of Maugham and Orwell.Changing bathing habits figure largely in Peter Ward’s The Clean Body. A Canadian professor, he includes North America as well as Western Europe in his survey of the development of personal hygiene in modern times. He begins by emphasising that in the 17th century, at the beginning of the ...”

“... dedicated to Milgram: empowerment … taking responsibility), as well as being the source for a Peter Gabriel song entitled ‘We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)’. A French punk rock group called Milgram put out a CD called Vierhundertfünfzig Volt (‘450 Volts’). A British band called Midget issued The Milgram Experiment. Plays have been written ...”

“... later appeared in several Fassbinder movies, is German; second, Powell can’t stop thinking of Peter Lorre. The effect is not subtle but it is compelling. Böhm doesn’t look anything like Lorre – he looks like a nicely brought up, slightly spoiled male model – but he keeps pulling these wonderfully eerie faces, staring off sideways, rolling his ...”

“... Peter Porter’s imagination tends towards the epigram, but not quite in the popular sense which suggests brief, pithy encapsulations of wit or wisdom: Believe me, Flaccus, the epigram is more than just a cracker-motto or an inch of frivolous joking to fill up a column. When, in 1972, he published the selection of translations called After Martial, he tended to avoid ‘the two-line squibs ...”

“... Technologies, the big data firm set up by the PayPal co-founder and Republican Party funder Peter Thiel, and Faculty, a small artificial intelligence company previously employed by Cummings’s Vote Leave campaign.During the summer, I was surprised to stumble across the name Public First in a spreadsheet of Cabinet Office spending data. Public First is ...”

“... and a congregation that includes Geri Halliwell, Bear Grylls, the former John Lewis chair Sharon White and the multi-millionaire Conservative donor Ken Costa.HTB’s approach is rooted less in exegesis than in religious conviction. ‘Enthusiasm is a big part of it,’ according to the writer Andrew Graystone. ‘You believe that your brand of Christianity ...”

“... closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens. Peter Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and diver who has been studying octopuses and other cephalopods in the wild, mostly off the coast of his native Sydney, for years. The alienness of octopuses, in his view, provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of ...”

“... idea of a Hitler cult among women. Jill Stephenson, writing in the collection of essays edited by Peter Stachura, disposes effectively of what one recent writer has called ‘the sacrificial willingness of women to be Hitler’s devotees’. The complex and changing position of women in the Third Reich admits of no such conclusion, while it is certain that ...”

“... Since the publication of Cities for a Small Country the Government has published an Urban White Paper, the first for 23 years, which proposes £1 billion of tax incentives, spread out over five years, aimed at encouraging people to buy homes in disadvantaged areas and to clean up contaminated land. The White Paper ...”

“... proportionate and proving again that longueurs have less to do with length than with pace, which Peter Carey controls like a master, thwacking his prose along with all the exuberant free energy of a boy thwacking a hoop with a stick. To Herbert Badgery – funny man, raconteur and compère extraordinary of Illywhacker – the notion that a book might seem ...”