“... attribution – sulky, angry, bewildered etc – seems appropriate, since we need to read these faces that are being isolated for us, but it’s also excessive. They are just faces. The actors are not acting, but standing there, as Sergio Leone, a later graduate of the same school of cinema, once told Clint Eastwood to do. The next shot of the ...”

“... romantic loves of George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult in the (relatively little-read) novel, Béatrix. It’s hard to know who could have done justice to the upper-class intellectual-bohemian melodrama played out in and around Coppet – perhaps Goethe’s troubling novel The Elective Affinities comes closest. Dennis Wood ends the chapter in ...”

“... background argument for the advocacy of collective security’. It could all too easily be read as a plea to avert the scourge of war, which threatened Western civilisation, through the creation of a viable international order, such as the League of Nations. Men like Murray, Woolf and Hammond were susceptible to the medium as well as the message: they ...”

“... dissected by Ken Coates, and treated like a first-year undergraduate’s essay by Professor Peter Townsend. With his publishers bringing its publication forward to catch the crisis, the book might look like a hastily-written manifesto for the alliance of born-again social democrats and ancient political re-treads among whom he may be doomed to ...”

“... self-destructive, stripped of family, a figure who slides towards pathos and even absurdity (Peter Sellers as moustache-twitching Gallic ingénu). At the beginning of the trail, the central event has already happened; the detective, divested of any power to abort or determine, can only reconstruct, seeking an origin, an ‘answer’. The genre is ...”

“... selling tickets for a benefit concert which starred the cast of Beyond the Fringe. At the gig, Peter Cook performed his Harold Macmillan routine, comparing the four-minute warning before a nuclear strike to Roger Bannister’s mile record (‘I’d like you to know that in this great country of ours a man can run a mile in four minutes’). In August I ...”

“... been incorrectly diagnosed and of the wrong answers half had come from specialists in cardiology. Peter Fleming’s absorbing history does not contain this sobering information, but then it stops at 1970 – and on an upbeat note, with the introduction of cyclosporin, the immunosuppressant drug, and an improved outlook for heart transplant patients. What ...”

“... intelligence that compensates for growing old. As Hercule Poirot had waxed moustaches, Lord Peter Wimsey collected first editions and Nero Wolfe wore yellow pyjamas, so Wexford is the sort of man who is always badly dressed and is never certain of having a clean handkerchief. Like Appleby, he has a tendency to quote from literature, but the detective ...”

“... It takes no time to see that Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor is a book wrought with extreme cunning. A slower discovery arrives, that this virtuosity on the surface goes with imaginative density and profundity of inquiry. Inquiry into many related topics: the vagrancy of youth, the corruption of obsession, the permanence of evil ...”

“... a misplaced desire to tease. John Wilkes met all these criteria, and was therefore much loved. Peter Thomas has produced the first serious study of Wilkes for some years. This neglect is surprising, in that Wilkes was the quintessential English Radical. With few teeth, a pronounced lisp and one of the most famous squints in history, he leers out of ...”

“... and concluding that it could go either way. Formally, too, he errs on the side of prudence. Unlike Peter Ackroyd, Holroyd doesn’t insert fictional passages; nor does he emulate Edmund Morris’s insertion of himself – as a schoolboy – into a life of Ronald Reagan. But he’s there nonetheless. It’s been possible to detect Holroyd’s presence in his ...”

“... bowl a long-hop.’ Denis Compton said: ‘He is a yobbo, who was never as good as he thinks.’ Peter May and his selectors refused even to pick Botham for England after the ban had expired. Was all this really because the game had been ‘brought into disrepute’ through Botham’s article on cannabis? Cannabis is illegal, but it is not dangerous, as far ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel is partly a narrative, partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors. It is an important and a depressing book, its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel ...”

“... an illusion. This is the hell most modern folk enter when they feel worthless; it is not dull to read about because negation is enacted through a surprising wealth of images. In one episode the poet shelters in the porch of a deserted church. It contains a sculpture of a sphinx menacing an angel holding an upright sword. Dozing, the poet is wakened by a ...”

“... Until this week I had read no work written by G.M. Trevelyan since my schooldays. No Cambridge supervisor that I can recall ever recommended any of his books, and I have certainly never prescribed them to my own students. Like most people, I knew – or thought I knew – that he had defined social history as ‘history with the politics left out’, and that he was one of the chief stuffed carcasses in the mausoleum of Whig history ...”