“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gone to heaven? Is he playing a game on his PC?On the voice-over to the first Fellowship trailer, Peter Jackson, who directed the movie, portends: ‘The technology has caught up with the incredible imagination that Tolkien injected into that story of his. And so, this is the time.’ Of the many strange things there are to observe about Tolkien, the way his ...”

“... extra heads. I’ll exhibit it. It will keep us in luxury.‘I’m on the pill,’ I said. An urge rose in me, to say: we are sexually very keen so I take three a day, do you think that’s enough? But then a stronger urge rose in me, to be sick on his shoes.I can see him, now that the years have flown; his crinkly fairish ...”

“... to ways of dealing with Britain’s rubbish. ‘Everything is checked,’ she says. Her colleague Peter Robinson chips in. ‘The whole area of waste handling and management is so much more technically sound in the UK than it ever was before.’ He smiles. ‘This country’s history of landfill has actually been quite safe; it has served us well.’ On the ...”

“... of productivity growth, opened up the potential for far higher profits. The stock market rose to extraordinary heights in anticipation of these profits. Financiers, the story goes, naturally responded to these firms’ elevated share prices by lending them money, or buying their shares. Rising investment enabled the accelerated introduction of new ...”

“... brilliant lawyer; a young man with no education, born in Wales in 1938 who went to sea at 17 and rose through the seamen’s union, via Ruskin College, to become an MP; a shammes’s son from a one-room flat in the East End, born in 1944, who trained as an accountant and then made a fortune after drifting into show business by starting a record label. Those ...”

“... volumes of the History to supply us with details and appropriate qualifications. In the meantime Peter Slee, in a trim and readable book, offers us his views on the place of history teaching in undergraduate liberal education at Oxford and Cambridge and in the new Late Victorian university college at Manchester. His concern is principally with what was ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... trials, half of which resulted in convictions, except during witch panics, when the rate usually rose. Not all communities bothered with the law. In 1705 in the fishing village of Pittenweem in Fife a mob set about Janet Cornfoot, who they believed had cast spells on the community. They dragged her to the harbour, hung her by the ankles, pelted her with ...”

“... somehow lurking in Howards End or the haunted garden of Kipling’s ‘They’ or the Neverland of Peter Pan. De la Mare inhabited that wistfulness not only because he was poetically averse to embracing modernity, but because it suited his technical gifts, and because his exquisite attention to detail and rhythm allowed him to invest wistfulness itself with a ...”

“... the strain. Is there enough inherent strength in ‘the sinews of the Russian state’, to use Peter Reddaway’s phrase, to sustain the free and democratic political life which its leaders advocate, and of which there are some signs? The answers Richard Sakwa and Alexander Yakovlev give to these questions are discouraging, even where they are not meant to ...”

“... uncompromising and deeply protective. She shied away from the lens, her most recent biographer, Peter Kurth, explains, because ‘she could make no natural motion while posing for the camera.’ Natural motion – as opposed to the engraved arcs and acrobatic tricks of classical ballet, the swooning decadence of the waltz or the silliness of social dancing ...”

“... that no one would suspect that the pope had left the building. At the church of SS Marcellin and Peter, the pope’s coach was met by the Bavarian ambassador, Count Karl von Spaur, who was clutching a pistol in his right hand, in case they were challenged. The fugitive was bustled into a small open carriage and driven out of the city, his face obscured by ...”