“... but the hands-on gardener king who could conjure rain, as Darius once did, by disrobing on a high hill at dawn and striking the earth with his sceptre, or who made the desert bloom with verdant foliage, was a well-established image of royalty in the Near East. And this was not mere fantasy. One of the most interesting discoveries of recent years was made at ...”

“... have known of later privatisations in Pinochet’s Chile. Until Bel’s recent research it was Peter Drucker, in his writings about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the ...”

“... friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’ Scarcely surprising, then, that De Quincey was touchy, quick ...”

“... Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-coloured overcoat and scarf to match with a grey fedora ...”

“... and in October took part in Italy’s first postwar motor race, the Parma to Poggio di Berceto hill climb. The following month he competed in the Targa Florio in Sicily. A spectator was killed when he ‘inadvertently crossed the finish line’, as Dal Monte puts it, ‘just as [the winning car] was speeding by’. Ferrari later wrote in his autobiography ...”

“... at Williams’s feet in the early Sixties, there is Terry Eagleton, ‘as allusively charming as Peter Wimsey’; at New Left Review, when it was embarking on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the ...”

“... with Children, Fight Club, The Full Monty, Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, King of the Hill, Titanic. We can usually think of one or two of these at the same time, but the sheer extent of Murdoch’s businesses is so vast that it is hard to hold them in the mind simultaneously. When his wife Anna filed for divorce and was asked the extent of her ...”

“... forgot to acknowledge the ancestral tribe of authors, editors and cartoonists who came before – Peter Arno, Charles Addams, John O’Hara, John Cheever, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, J.D. Salinger, E.B. White, Katharine White (the Mrs White of his telegram) and the sainted William Maxwell – nor did he pull up the ladder against younger novices coming ...”

“... It was by way of an article by Forster about Crabbe that Britten came upon the idea of Peter Grimes. He was so pleased that Forster liked his music that he presented him with a score of the ‘Michelangelo Sonnets’ and also with a gramophone, and despite the thirty-odd gap in their years they became friends. In 1951, when Britten was asked to ...”

“... he was rejected. ‘I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.’ The lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s standard ring out like a mocking chorus from the Yankee Stadium when the hometown wins. Poor Trump, who thought the song should be his anthem, could never shake his ‘little town blues’. His humiliation ...”

“... Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very recently, it was thought, in-house, to be a legitimate part of an undercover ...”

“... which would weaken the purchase of both the Blairite Third Way and Cameron’s bloodless Notting Hill Toryism.The chief priorities of Corbyn’s Labour Party were neatly captured in two speeches made by John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor and often the project’s most eloquent spokesman. In 2016 he declared that Labour members would ‘no longer have to ...”

“... facilitate his voyeuristic impulses. This was not true: the mirror belonged to Keeler’s friend Peter Rachman, the slum landlord. But at the trial it became the symbol of ‘the very depths of lechery and depravity’ to which Ward was willing to sink. Griffith-Jones instructed the jury that it was their patriotic duty to convict such a man. The judge, Sir ...”

“... surprised to find that this was one of the points Hans was to make in his 75th-birthday tribute to Peter Pears, published in 1985. His salute opened with one of those magisterial rebukes, ‘Every musician knows that normally singers are amongst the most unmusicianly, if not indeed unmusical, members of our profession,’ but went on to praise Pears (as ...”

“... need to do so, grew marketable apples, kept hens, geese and bees. For the house built for him by Peter Harland, he involved himself, following good arts and crafts tradition, in the choice of timbers, bricks and pavings, insisting on the inclusion of local flints. He was devoted to the Newbury Players, the strictly amateur orchestra he ...”