“... seems to have any interests – not literature or art or politics or themselves. They are, as Rose Macaulay astutely noted, ‘amiable nitwits’, and some of them aren’t that amiable. You can see the force in Bradbury’s remark that Waugh’s novels of this period are in a way ‘anti-novels’, their mode defined by a deliberate refusal to undertake ...”

“... in particular discomforts her. In it Witold writes of having found peace through ‘the perfect rose between the legs of a certain woman’. The invisible worm has found out her bed of crimson joy. She dislikes the image: it is at once too flowery, too perfumed and too coarse. Naming the rose and locating it with such ...”

“... man: ‘Poor Ted.’ Over the years the name changed, ‘Poor Roger’ (my first husband), ‘Poor Peter’ (her son), ‘Poor Martin’ (or any other man who she thought had been treated badly by a woman). But as far as I was concerned the death of Sylvia was before my time, if only by weeks, in the same way that the end of the Second World War was before my ...”

“... new Escalier Daru in the Louvre surmounting a reconstruction of the prow on which it originally rose above the rocks of Samothrace. This event provoked a rage for colossal windswept personifications on the skylines of buildings, which reached a climax in the quadrigas by George Récepon which burst with exhilarating absurdity from the roof of the Grand ...”

“... Russell on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter Thomas on Court and country cultures) is intelligently deployed, but not always searchingly tested against the events Mr Fletcher describes. And Mr Fletcher is careful to warn us that ‘although this book contains a new narrative it is in no sense an ...”

“... in Europe: they have been virtually eliminated, according to Mitford, in the United States. Peter Chamberlen, a Huguenot barber-surgeon whose family settled in London, invented the forceps in 1588. The family kept it a secret for over a hundred years, travelling about to attend the births of those wealthy enough to pay for their ministrations. Not only ...”

“... We’re filming a history teacher read from Lorimer’s New Testament in Scots, the passage where Peter denies Christ and a servant quean says: ‘yer Galille twang outs ye.’ The interior of the church seems very military. I count 11 crowns among the regimental crests in the war memorial window, two British Legion flags, a drum in a glass case near the ...”

“... arrived early. Aged six, she gouged out Tinker Bell’s eyes in an illustrated edition of Peter Pan (‘My first act of proto-feminist critique in the realm of the visual’). Referring to it as a ‘desecration’, Nochlin said: ‘I hoped it hurt, and I was both frightened and triumphant looking at the black holes in the expensive paper. I hated ...”

“... for non-payment of taxes and fines, and it was in this context that chapter 29 of Magna Carta rose to near scriptural status: ‘No freeman [for which now read person] shall be … exiled, or any other wise destroyed … but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.’ Baker points out the potential relevance of this still-extant ...”

“... part of it (the rags-to-riches, Cinderella part) shapes the real-life story of J.K. Rowling, who rose out of obscurity and deprivation to claim her literary sovereignty. Rowling has been praised for what Lurie and others regard as a particularly British talent for writing for children, but the story she tells is widespread in other cultures, too: the birth ...”

“... if technically difficult way to decorate a Gothic building, was obtained from the German painter Peter von Cornelius. Hugely popular exhibitions of potential schemes were held in Westminster Hall and much discussed, for the public expected a lot for their money. The scheme was supposed to encourage artists, educate visitors, stimulate the members of the ...”

“... enough to sustain more than three hundred closely printed pages of dutiful third-person narrative. Peter Jernigan is better company on the page, largely because in the novel named after him he tells his own story. He’s writing, he indicates early on, in an institution of some kind – it turns out to be a drying-out facility – and has no memory of being ...”

“... one another, terrified that the wrong cleric had censed the pope.Amid the ruins, a new city slowly rose. Ambitious popes such as Nicholas V in the 1440s and 1450s, known for his wild spending on buildings, books and vestments, and Julius II half a century later, found ways to mark the city as their own. Nicholas fortified the Borgo, the area around Saint ...”

“... have lost the battle but we will win the war.’ Two messages from the SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell (who is married to Sturgeon), sent the day after Salmond was first charged, were leaked to the Westminster MP and former Holyrood justice secretary Kenny MacAskill, one of Salmond’s allies. In the first, Murrell appeared to call for pressure to be ...”

“... landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. ‘The river itself becomes a tremulous deity,’ he asserts. I carried Ackroyd’s epic, Thames: Sacred River, as I made a ...”