“... he knew would be orphaned on release, but he never turned in a bum performance, a money grab. His hall of fame stats are beyond dispute: numerous bestsellers, countless awards, multiple volumes in the Library of America, and, perhaps the ultimate honour, a cameo on The Simpsons.Despite his astonishing range (poems, prefaces, novels, collections of short ...”

“... the Women’s Liberation protesters who stormed the Miss World competition at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970. I must have known about it already, but it was like I’d never got the point. Listening to that programme, for some reason, took me right back into my dumpy little-girl body, shamed at the sight of those poor women in their horrid swimsuits, shamed ...”

“... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...”

“... were aware that others weren’t so fortunate. During trips to London, Michael and his brother, Peter, helped serve food in East End soup kitchens and were taken along to suffragist meetings. Tippett attended his first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky at the Queen’s Hall. When ...”

“... volumes of the History to supply us with details and appropriate qualifications. In the meantime Peter Slee, in a trim and readable book, offers us his views on the place of history teaching in undergraduate liberal education at Oxford and Cambridge and in the new Late Victorian university college at Manchester. His concern is principally with what was ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... cannon up a muddy slope under fire, and to the archaic rituals of a treason trial in Westminster Hall. He takes his readers through second after grisly second as the executioner almost severs Lord Kilmarnock’s neck with his first stroke, but makes an agonising, drawn-out mess of Lord Balmerino’s death.Like many contemporary historians and ...”

“... of 14-year-old schoolboys, so fantastically improbable does its success still appear. It required Peter Taylor, a burly, buzz-cut ex-marine, to convince Japanese immigration officials that he was in Osaka to perform with the violinist Taro Hakase. It featured a wad of $10,000 yen tied in a hairband to ‘tip’ a departure gate official in Osaka. And it ...”

“... does occur; they hear his call, which leaves the air on the ‘dark stair’ and in the ‘empty hall’ of the ‘lone house’ ‘stirred and shaken’, while their failure to answer is experienced by the Traveller as a response in itself: ‘And he felt in his heart their strangeness,/Their stillness answering his cry.’ The parting command that he ...”

“... of great letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress describing his mock-execution and pardon, about which he made little at the time, or the account he later gave his brother of his time in penal servitude. These things were all to be written up later by the novelist. Unlike ...”

“... na Mara (‘shieling of the sea’) in Kilpheder (from the Gaelic Cille-pheadair, or ‘church of Peter’). Ten square miles of machair stretch from the western dunes to the eastern rocky moors. This is a plain of shell-sand, where millions of cockles and whelks, razor-shells and buckies, ground into ivory fragments smaller than a baby’s fingernail, have ...”

“... to, Monty Johnstone’s is a name that recurs, along with the philosopher Hyman (Hymie) Levy, Peter Fryer the journalist, and Brian Pearce, well known today as a translator of historical works from French and Russian. Levy she remembers as a very persuasive public speaker, whose Edinburgh accent ‘made everything sound reasonable’. Her observation post ...”

“... Street Hill Monument to the Fire, the Haberdashers’ School, Montagu House in Bloomsbury, Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, Ramsbury Manor in Wiltshire, the Fleet Ditch, the reconstructed Tangier Mole, and possibly several more of the rebuilt City churches than the three (St Benet Paul’s Wharf, St Edmund the King and St Martin within Ludgate) that are now ...”

“... I hated it! Or . . . Delicatessen. I couldn’t stand it . . . And I feel the same way about Peter Greenaway’s films . . . Yet I still get compared to these directors now and then.’ In the introduction to Trier on von Trier, Stig Björkman makes it clear where he places von Trier: ‘His development . . . is as daring as it is astonishing,’ he ...”

“... shadow chancellor, after an alleged leak of sensitive information had impugned the probity of both Peter Thorneycroft, the chancellor of the exchequer, and Oliver Poole, the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, ‘with his vast City interests’. Poole naturally insisted that his name be cleared, and the resulting Bank Rate Tribunal found that there was ...”