“... was Jackie Kennedy, with whom Adlai Stevenson asked the cast of Beyond the Fringe to supper in New York in 1963. They went and I didn’t. Never spelling it out to myself, I clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue and not, as I came too late to see, a bore. I don’t quite spill all this out to the waiting courier, who is a graduate of UCL ...”

“... review christening the biography ‘a narrative masterwork’ was published in the New York Times Book Review on 1 April, Bailey tweeted a humblebraggy ‘it’s all downhill from here,’ or words to that effect. He was righter than he knew. Ozick’s magisterial blessing of Roth and The Biography represented the heights and from there on it was ...”

“... be non-violent. In the 1960s Margaret Lovatt lived for six months with a young male dolphin called Peter as part of a Nasa project to teach dolphins to speak. The pair grew extremely close. Peter would often get sexually aroused and rub himself against Lovatt, disrupting their language lessons. Eventually Lovatt started to ...”

“... for depriving them of their homes.’ Under Israeli pressure, Zukerman lost his job as a New York correspondent for the London-based Jewish Chronicle. Arthur Lourie, the Israeli consul general in New York, exulted in his firing: ‘a real MITZVAH’.Zukerman wasn’t alone. In 1953, the American Reform rabbi Morris ...”

“... Martens, short hair again. Without this you could not get into clubs like the Mineshaft [in New York], where the doorman smelled you to make sure you weren’t wearing aftershave. In fact, so dark were the recesses of the Mineshaft all you could really do was touch and smell.Ah, the Mineshaft. White wrote about it in States of Desire: Through an archway is ...”

“... in a fitting manner by the biggest tent show in the universe. As the Minister without Portfolio, Peter Mandelson, asserts in a document issued by the Cabinet Office: ‘millenniums only come once in a thousand years.’ Or at approximately the same interval as Labour governments with a mandate to do whatever they want, with absolutely no come-back, in the ...”

“... on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job ...”

“... that, during his lifetime, his articles were dispersed. It’s only now, with the publication of Peter McDonald’s and Michael Suarez’s thoughtful edition of his selected essays, that readers can gain some sense of his reach. McKenzie read the analytical bibliography in which he’d been trained as the long-lost twin of New Criticism: both treated texts ...”

“... Group.’ When not at Ascot or at L’Ecu de France, Bernard Ingham presents himself as a bluff York-shireman, ‘an extremely awkward cuss’ with a ‘simple direct way’ of calling ‘a spade a spade’. Part of the ‘awkward cuss’ image harks back to the rough days of his youth and his early leanings towards the Labour Party. He even joined the ...”

“... relatively indifferent to the sex of the authors she’s dealing with. But in Eagleton-eyed Peter Gibbons, who wrote the chapter on non-fiction, Sturm found someone in tune with his editorial song. ‘Writing,’ Gibbons tells us, ‘like Marx’s capital, arrives in New Zealand “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and ...”

“... into close relations with Hugh Gaitskell. It would be unkind as well as inaccurate to call him the Peter Mandelson of the Gaitskell years, not least because, unlike Mandelson, he had established constituency roots before he began and also because, unlike Mandelson, he had rather little impact on the actual presentation of the Party’s policies, which remained ...”

“... at the hands of the Courtenays in 1455. And if one Lancastrian knight of the shire, Sir Peter Bessels of Berkshire, took the then highly unusual initiative of sponsoring a new monastic college at Oxford, the heretical religious interests of Sir John Oldcastle led to his being burned while hanging (presumably still alive) in St Giles’s Fields in ...”

“... to such earlier romance memoirs and traveller’s tales as Robert Paltock’s The Adventures of Peter Wilkins, the memoirs of the Comtesse d’Aulnoy and the better-known Moll Flanders and Tristram Shandy. But Saunders’s readings lucidly reveal the origins of the continuing, ever growing eagerness of audiences to feel that what they are experiencing has ...”

“... and subsequent correspondence from Elizabeth Wade White, another collector and supporter, and Peter Pears. Valentine introduced Craske’s pictures to her friend and occasional lover Dorothy Warren, who owned a gallery in Maddox Street (the one from which police confiscated D.H. Lawrence’s paintings when they were exhibited in July 1929): Warren was ...”

“... was typical of commercial and financial oligarchies from 17th-century London to 20th-century New York. The second emphasises the pastoral role of the state and its duty to create social harmony and exalt hierarchy through ‘a well-ordered public space and beneficent, universal public power’. These ideas had their origins in absolutism; they resurfaced in ...”