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“... of the Press’ and the self-interrogating sections from Ukulele Music warn the reviewer of Peter Reading that he risks becoming entangled in his subject like a gladiator in a net. Even his editors at Secker (not to mention the printer) must feel unnerved – which is excellent. This is poetry at its most unpredictable: we wouldn’t be surprised to ...”

“... a reputation as Leftists. The two officers at the centre of this molehunt were Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Wright was a brilliant scientist and a grammar-school patriot who always doubted the patriotism of his public-school superiors. He held extreme right-wing views. His devotion to rooting out Lefties at the top placed him at the head of the Fluency ...”

“... of having their knees nailed to the furniture. The fallen state of Private Eye is illustrated by Peter McKay’s foolish and ill-written book, Inside Private Eye, but scornful young readers should remember that this downmarket old fogey was once a young fogey. It stood up to the Krays, a plucky little public-school rag-mag. This brings us back to The Old ...”

“... promising to correct it. Perhaps name changes are of more general interest. In Decline and Fall Peter Chetwynde started without a Best and Dr Benito, the press secretary in Scoop, was originally Bonham Carter Jackson. Brideshead is much altered. Charles Ryder began as Peter Fenwick and ...”

“... surface. An enormous dried sunflower is attached, inverted, in the centre of the canvas. Peter Schjeldahl saw an ‘energetic contradiction of the frontal and the recessive’ in these works, which he compares to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. He refers to the sense of being caught between diving into the ...”

“... artist seems not to look at his own painting but at his subject. The exception is a photograph of Jackson Pollock ‘working’, and he of course had no subject in this sense. In their paintings of painting, artists did not, then, always bother to make it clear that they looked at the marks that they were making. However, I expect they knew that we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... paunches.’ Out on the dance floor the guests were in high spirits, dancing the twist to Michael Jackson songs performed with a Russian accent by a local singer. The men had taken their jackets off and their shirts were tight. ‘You know what Russians mean when they say they oppose the state?’ Bella asked. ‘It means they can screw it over.’ As a ...”

“... quote, something concrete. We use Hazlitt to advertise and illuminate other writers and artists. Peter Marshall does so in his new biography, William Godwin. Hazlitt’s vivid account of Godwin’s political importance appears on the first page of Marshall’s introduction, and his worthy book is studded with variations on ‘as Hazlitt rightly ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a sympathetic but intellectually astute account of the work that any academic would kill for (by Peter Ghosh), a full bibliography of the works, a brief but mordantly funny sketch of McKibbin’s unrelieved gloom as a writer of political journalism. One might think that such fidelity to the genre would make the book unreadable, but the opposite is ...”

“... of photographers like Atget and Sander. In a rare essay on Lorck’s drawings from 1955, Peter Ward-Jackson noticed ‘the hallucinatory quality’ of his work, ‘the morbid trend of his imagination’ and ‘his predilection for the weird and the sinister’. Lorck practised bizarre conjunctions and often ...”

“... Sixties, however, the Holocaust barely figured in the life of America, or of America’s Jews. As Peter Novick remarks, between the end of World War Two and the late Sixties, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. Jewish intellectuals paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish ...”

“... Manchester was a brilliant place in Todd’s day, the staff including Patrick Blackett, Willis Jackson, Michael Polanyi and the historian L.B. Namier. When the war came, Todd was made chairman of the chemical committee responsible for the development and production of chemical warfare agents. After the war I served under Todd on a committee that had to ...”