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“... and Glasgow also enthral him. He is baffled by those like G.M. Trevelyan and, more recently, Peter Hall, who have found in the Victorian urban patchwork only muddle. Yet muddle there was, the reader is reminded, as idea locks horns with idea and style jostles with style. Take the marginal matter of style. The industrial cities were aware they amounted to ...”

“... Does Peter Lake​ ever sleep? Even at 666 pages this is not the longest of his books, which descend on the study of the decades around 1600 like a great waterfall. There are no signs of fatigue, no inanimate sentences. Behind the loosely conversational manner of his prose lies a precision of thought and structure ...”

“... real world and an ideal alternative. Both Jack Zipes’s The Wounded Storyteller and Peter Wortsman’s ‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny include translations of ‘The Sandman’, Hoffmann’s most famous text. ‘The Sandman’, the ur-text on the Doppelgänger, has been the object of a dizzying number of readings, among them ...”

“... for short – within walking distance of Notting Hill. In the 1950s, the area was the domain of Peter Rachman, the Polish-born refugee turned slum landlord who exploited the hostility of the housing market towards Black immigrants, buying up run-down houses in Paddington and North Kensington and renting them to desperate people at extortionate ...”

“... air. Ravers joined in a raggedy coalition with the New Travellers, whose knowledge of England’s green spaces proved crucial to evading the police. Out of this emerged the ‘free party’: an outdoor gathering that broadly resembled the free festivals of the 1970s and 1980s, but with space rock and campfires swapped for cutting-edge electronic music and ...”

“... triumphs are those of 1945, 1964 and 1997; neither has found any inspiration in 1924 or 1929. Peter Clark and David Torrance both set out to reassert the political importance of the 1924 government and to restore the place of its senior figures in the history of the Labour Party. Both focus on high politics, and in particular the way the members of the ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Iread​ Peter Biskind’s book about the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, long ago. Apart from scraps of celebrity anecdote, what I remember of it now is something more diffuse, a mood associated with the mysterious figures of the producers: an impression of flared trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born ...”

“... manufactured a French infiltrator called Spy Nozy. How, then, should a Life of Blake be written? Peter Ackroyd is having a go at one, and I suspect that what attracts him is Blake’s London, for which King has very little feeling. The poetry is crowded with London voices and London places. I remember my delight as a student when a supervisor remarked that ...”

“... the press is free because it is free from government control. In parallel, the later Government Green Paper calls for a ‘lighter’ regulation in commercial radio. The Government simply cannot take on board that at the present time regulation is the means to secure diversity of opinion and diversity of programme. The truth is that the Peacock exemplar of ...”

“... down, physical sensations overwhelmed him. He had infiltrated the pages of Patrick Kavanagh’s Green Fool, but the lyricism was spattered with ancient brutalities, bedridden bachelors, mud-slow policemen, bicycles, stone fields – and, always, the drink. Attending him on the farm, as in the city, never further than the end of the bed, was his dark ...”

“... a mirror to his nose. She diagnosed paranoia. The Wolf-Man knew immediately what that meant: Uncle Peter. He had abandoned his mansion, set up a tent in a secluded field on his estate and had lived with his farm animals, believing everyone else lied to him. He eventually died of exposure and neglect and was found by his servants, semi-devoured by rats. That ...”

“... Irina Nakhova, a founder of Moscow Conceptualism, has restored the 1914 building to its original green. The Austrian pavilion looks empty; Heimo Zobernig’s contribution is a black false ceiling. It doesn’t have much to say, unlike the Uruguayan pavilion by Marco Maggi, which also gives the impression of having nothing in it until one gets up close. The ...”

“... lines distributed among ten stanzas – the sort of poetry mathematics of which Peter Reading, an admirer of Armitage’s work, is master), but altogether another to write 1000 lines to a year-end deadline, not least when attempting an essentially public poem which reflects on our times and recollects some recent headline-grabbing ...”