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“... Brigade is another – that the British seem almost to revel in, even to gain strength from. As Peter Cook said in Beyond the Fringe, ‘we need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.’ The general verdict today is that it could never have worked. The strategy was foolish and hopeless. One major of the Gurkhas thought that ...”

“... to do with the bombings. My attention​ was first drawn to the Birmingham case by my friend Peter Chippendale, who covered the trial for the Guardian. He told me he thought the wrong people had been convicted. It was ten years or so before I began to investigate the matter. In the early 1980s I persuaded Carmen Callil at Chatto and Windus to commission ...”

“... more than a cosmetic choice. Displaying all the insouciant condescension of a Walpolean oligarch, Peter Mandelson mused that ‘the era of pure representative democracy is coming slowly to an end.’ Each party adopted the same techniques. If they were aware that they were making the political class look alien, uncaring and fake, there was no electoral ...”

“... And looking beyond the limits of this collection, what about Count Metternich (not to speak of Peter Mandelson, who is invoked, perhaps not altogether seriously, in the publisher’s press release)? ‘The World of the Favourite’ appears to be a piece of string which can be stretched so far that it turns into fairly useless elastic. It was also a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and a shiny new penny.’ Despite living for many years in London and New York (and marrying Tina Brown), Evans has retained an agreeable touch of puzzled or even prudish innocence: ‘the effing and blinding that is the vernacular today’ was unknown in his family. Perhaps he doesn’t realise just how interesting he is in this respect. He comes from a ...”

“... BBC, the press – colluded in presenting Cameron’s Rwandan adventure as a mistake. Would Gordon Brown, who has some power to act and a track record of serious intent when it comes to Africa, have fared any better if he had been in Rwanda and Cameron had been in London, chairing emergency committees while waiting for the flood waters to subside? If ...”

“... pupil, was an important new influence, as were other American composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young. He even contemplated emigrating to the United States. Cardew returned to London to digest these discoveries and to propagate the music of his new friends. He became involved, as the music editor, with New Departures, an arts magazine ...”

“... once blisteringly white and standing for all that was new in architecture and living, was painted brown to elude the Luftwaffe. The moment had passed. But in the year of the hole, Hepworth and Nicholson (who hadn’t quite left Winifred, though he would divorce her in 1938) lived in Belsize Park, at No. 7 Mall Studios, a row of artists’ living and working ...”

“... right-wing European politicians. Most of those present supported a Hungarian cardinal called Peter Erdo. ‘He’s what we need right now,’ Tim Busch, president of the conservative Napa Institute in California, told the Times. ‘We need someone who can teach clearly and be strong.’ When it came to the cardinals’ vote, Erdo’s case could not have ...”

“... For Wearing, contemporary drama (the ‘journalism of the imagination’) was the loser. Even Peter Flannery’s triumphant mid-1990s nine-parter Our Friends in the North was shown despite rather than because of the prevailing BBC ethos. Michael Jackson, then head of BBC2, described the serial as ‘without doubt the contemporary drama event of the ...”

“... the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect him, soon faded. But Gordon Brown’s firm refusal to abandon sterling, made from his position of strength at the Exchequer, maintained the status quo bequeathed by Major. London would sign up to the Social Chapter that Major had sidestepped, but despite increasingly frantic pressure from ...”

“... This produced such aperçus from Johnson as – in response to an anti-lockdown article by Peter ‘Bonkers’ Hitchens – ‘My heart is with Bonkers. I don’t believe in any of this, it’s all bullshit. I wish I’d been the mayor in Jaws and kept the beaches open.’ And – in response to data showing that the median age of people dying of Covid ...”

“... smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is brilliant, setting the scene for what is to be a bleak story, introducing some of the leading characters, and insinuating that the author was eyewitness to an intimate ...”

“... his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost circle of the school’. However, as Peter Campbell wrote in the LRB (3 February 2011), English painters ‘responded to Impressionism’s escape from the academic into the everyday, but made something tighter and darker of it. The French pleasure in picnics and river parties and weather wasn’t ...”