“... account of muscular and gestural movement, frame by frame, as we find it in Wyndham Lewis, early Peter Weiss, the Beckett of Watt (the turn of the century Germans even had a word for it: Sekundenstil)? But it is not analytic; it does not break conventional gestures, conventional acts and names (‘I took a carton of milk’) into the ‘neural ...”

“... far than Los Angeles in the past and Athens in the future as a venue for the Olympics,’ stated Peter Warren, Lee Valley’s head of corporate marketing. Lee Valley’s Strategic Business Plan (2000-10) is preparing the ground for change and innovation. ‘The Leisure Centre is an ageing building over 25 years old and the whole complex is subject to ...”

“... enemies include Gail Wynand, a newspaper mogul who likes to buy up writers and corrupt them; Peter Keating, a charming rival damned by too-easy success; Ellis Toohey, an indescribably evil left-wing journalist and intellectual, based, it is said, on Harold Laski and Lewis Mumford. Another antagonist is Dominique Francon, the ...”

“... of his rage at intrusions into his privacy, and one remembers him forcing the withdrawal of John Peter’s article from Essays in Criticism because it suggested a homosexual element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first reaction ...”

“... Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book, in which the journalists Peter Finn and Petra Couvée pick through a cache of documents, released to them by the CIA, that confirms the long extant rumour of the agency’s role in publishing the text in Russian.2 This rumour had already been investigated (it took him twenty years) by ...”

“... Quarrel that Ended it by Ronald Aronson (Chicago, 2004), and Algeria: France’s Undeclared War by Martin Evans (Oxford, 2011), a formidable successor to Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace. But see also Albert Camus’s ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’: A Text and it Contexts by Neil Foxlee (Peter Lang, 2010) and ...”

“... If Jesus himself were one of his characters, there he would be, centre-forward and listening to Peter Gabriel, carrying his coffee cup to the sink. Being ‘closely bound to the moment’ is a paradisiacal state, as Egil explains. We are certainly that. The moment, according to Kierkegaard, was ‘the very gateway to the Kingdom of God’. So Knausgaard’s ...”

“... late 1950s together with his teenage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. In the movie Holly meets Kit (Martin Sheen) in a South Dakota town: ‘Little did I realise,’ she tells us over an image of her twirling her baton on the street, ‘that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana.’ When her father ...”

“... in San Francisco in 1955 to defend lesbian rights and build a lesbian community; its founders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, were the first couple to get married when City Hall opened to same-sex weddings in 2004; and while the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City are justly famous, drag queens in San Francisco had demonstrated against police oppression three ...”

“... did we.There were nine Ferraris on the track, along with two Lamborghinis, a Porsche, an Aston Martin, a Maserati, a McLaren, an Alfa Romeo, a pair of Audis and a Nissan (if you think that sounds like the odd one out, think again: the Nissan GT-R has a top speed of nearly 200 mph and can go from 0 to 60 in 2.7 seconds). The F430 (top speed 197 mph, and 0 ...”

“... I probably had Scotland on my mind, like he did. He wanted to talk about the television plays of Peter McDougall and said I probably knew all about the people depicted in them, working-class rowdies who preferred to create hell on a Saturday night. After a disastrous editing test, in which I rewrote a piece by Frank Kermode and introduced a dozen ...”

“... that little had changed. (The book was published in Spanish in 1981; the English translation by Peter Bush comes out this summer.) As a landlord and his guests languorously discuss peasants and their lack of culture, he boasts that there are no illiterates among his tenants, and to prove it he invites some of them to the dining room to display their ...”

“... innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them – Gurney’s, Edward Thomas’s, Owen’s – rise from ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... something that the social at its highest serves to nourish and protect, as the parent the child. Martin Buber called it the ‘I:Thou relation’. The two kings as children loved each other. Under the frigid social discourse lies the necessity that empowers it, the human innocence of loving. But the second courtier, Camillo, makes it plain how appallingly ...”