“... 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 ...”

“... the husband’s prematurely withered appearance (‘his deep eye-sockets . . . those two white moles with hairs on them . . . a bitterness in the mouth and a venom in the glance’), and of course the name Casaubon itself, all suggest a deliberate likeness. In public, Francis Pattison, who remained on good terms with Eliot, always denied having ...”

“... with any aspect of foreign policy … I can confirm that there have never been, whether in White House talks, in telegrams, in ambassadorial approaches, or even on the hot line, any attempts to link Vietnam with economic or monetary co-operation. In a cabinet meeting in February 1966 Wilson again denied the link, and Richard Crossman, the minister of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... world, he reminisces about the journey he made, the spillage from life into artefact: black and white photographs, home-movie footage, drawings by Eden, letters from friends. And bushels of porn. The outer chamber is stacked with tastefully framed images of pink people doing pink things; limited scenarios enacted, with limited enthusiasm, in budget hotel ...”

“... Rage and Betrayal, the highly prejudicial ABC programme of 12 April 1996, in which the newscaster Peter Jennings called McVeigh a ‘monster’ and cited passages from Pierce’s book. Parallels between bomb-making in The Turner Diaries and by McVeigh were made much of in Joseph Hartzler’s opening address to the jury. The only material evidence produced by ...”

“... Yet outlandishly low temperatures alone cannot account for the tremendous success of Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, even if it does open with a bleak Copenhagen December, and go on to describe a still colder place – Greenland, covered by an icecap up to a mile thick, with a climate so severe that if you need to drop your ...”

“... they applied so liberally to their hair. Caribbean doctors, judges and lawyers were invariably white and England came to be associated with rectitude, the pulling-up of socks and standing to attention. In the Cadet Corps, on school Speech Days, whenever the National Anthem was played, Englishness compelled deference and a feeling that one was in the ...”

“... into supposing they would accept the amendments. Because his Arrente grandmother had children by a white miner, his family were known as ‘half-castes’, and were thus subject to officials’ improving efforts, which removed them from the influence of traditional ‘full blood’ Aborigines. Perkins’s mother Hetti was ‘dormitory girl’ in an ...”

“... 4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived with the message wrongly punctuated: ‘Season’s Greeting’s ...”