“... little immediate recollection of where it had once been headed. A lengthy shot of a beige and dark green patchwork quilt of fields corrugated by ploughing reminded me of the irregular hatchings in Paul Klee’s notebooks. These were his attempt to explain what it might mean to speak of the freedom of the ‘active’ line in art. ‘The primordial ...”

“... Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’ – ‘the mansion-house of liberty’ – or in ‘Comus’, ‘the green shops’. On the one hand, therefore, the loyalist imagination – ‘linen decency’ and ‘a stark and dead congealment’ – and on the other a generous variety of poetic practices, ‘republican industry’ he calls them as a whole, that free the ...”

“... It’s nine o’clock but they are still haymaking above Eldroth, the newly-mown fields fresh and green. Then down into Giggleswick to a silly supper and a game of Trivial Pursuit. To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy. London. To supper at the Camden Brasserie. It’s a hot night and the shutters have been ...”

“... law and medicine. Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony Shadid was an exception. As ...”

“... there may sometimes be good justification for studying the limited population, as there was for Peter Marris in his Widows and their Families of 1958: Marris was specifically concerned with the economic as well as the emotional needs of widows in what was still the closely-knit community of Bethnal Green. Parkes has no ...”

“... he and Romana kept an open house where George Harrison first met Ravi Shankar and the actor Peter Eyre remembered seeing Barbra Streisand talking to Jonathan Miller, who liked to ‘arse around’ doing sketches while McEwen played. The party carried on later in Scotland, where on his brother’s death McEwen bought Bardrochat, the other family ...”

“... 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship between guide and history. Peter Cunningham had followed his guide to Westminster Abbey of 1842 with a two-volume historical Handbook of London, which went through two editions in 1849-1850. It was an outstanding work and H.B. Wheatley based his London Past and Present on it in ...”

“... of Clive James.* When, at one of the actual Festival’s talk-ins, I said that it was odd to find Peter Porter missing from various standard anthologies of Australian verse, I was given the clear impression that P.P. had simply got what he deserved. Among poets there was much talk of an ‘Australian identity’; one way of asserting this identity was to be ...”

“... may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which launched Oasis, whose founder, Alan McGee, gave ...”

“... a number of marriages and meets just about everyone worth meeting. Anthony Powell and Henry Green are his contemporaries at Oxford; he takes tea with Ottoline Morrell and twits Virginia Woolf. Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh are London acquaintances. Picasso sketches his portrait, Hemingway is a fellow war correspondent, and Paris brings a meeting with ...”

“... and work on the bridge came to a halt because of the war. The planners also envisaged more green spaces (replacing the working-class districts where former Communists and Social Democrats lived), the rationalisation of the transport system and the disaggregation of the population into low-density urban cells. They were still at work in April ...”

“... where else do you get a name like that?’ To us cocky British snobs who call the great man ‘Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ and don’t much mind what he called himself, the ‘mistake’ of the tourists is not tragical. But, for William Gaddis, this sort of ignorance leads up to the climax of The Recognitions, where his most admirable character – Stanley, the ...”

“... couple who both supported the IG and exposed Hamilton to Duchamp – most importantly, to The Green Box, the book of notes detailing the making of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a.k.a. The Large Glass. At this time, too, together with Paolozzi and Henderson, Hamilton began to haunt natural history museums, to comb through glossy ...”

“... of spin’, have had much claim to democratic plausibility. One was Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, now best remembered for the Festival of Britain. Well before then he ran the LCC in the Thirties, presiding over a coalition of trades-unionists and educated Hampstead women with Blairite discipline and Tammany-Hall ...”

“... in stocking) by her teenage daughter and her daughter’s chum. The case was the subject of Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures. It is one of the few things Bainbridge had in common with her contemporary Angela Carter, who in the 1980s wrote a screenplay about the murder. An early version of Bainbridge’s novel was turned down by several ...”