“... in his youth. The partnership has inspired plays and novels, from Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist to Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr Dee. Its apotheosis, in this picaresque sense, is the notorious occasion at Trebon Castle in southern Bohemia, when the spirits revealed to Kelley their wish that he and Dee should ‘hold their wives in common’. That Jane Dee ...”

“... a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the bosom. How would she not make anyone nervous? Peter Bradshaw has written that Taylor and Clift ‘are almost like reflections of each other; when they kiss, something incestuous and thrillingly forbidden throbs out of the screen.’ Charlie Chaplin told Stevens it was ‘the greatest film ever made about ...”

“... such as the US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Trump’s favourite economic adviser, Peter Navarro, the question is why the effort to enrol China in the world economy was undertaken in the first place, and who benefited from an experiment that has gone so badly wrong.The crude Trumpian take, which is perhaps also the kindest, is that the US ...”

“... most of which would have been to pay for continuous care. Ledwidge also tells the story of ‘Peter’, who served with him in the same reservist unit. A talented linguist, physically fit and a promising commander, he was seen as an ideal candidate for special forces, but was seriously injured in a bomb attack in 2006. The MoD told him, wrongly, that as a ...”

“... its way to the library of Cornell University; quotations from it appear in John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello’s 1997 biography of John Stanislaus. On 26 and 27 and 28 May, Charlie Joyce noted that his father was drunk, and again on 31 May and 1 and 2 and 13 and 14 and 15 June. And on Sunday 24 June: ‘Pappie home to dinner very drunk: shouting, swearing ...”

“... reality renouncement which is at the heart of Christian techniques of the self.Recently, Professor Peter Brown stated to me that what we have to understand is why it is that sexuality became, in Christian cultures, the seismograph of our subjectivity. It is a fact, a mysterious fact, that in this indefinite spiral of truth and reality in the self sexuality has ...”

“... coincided with the eruption of identity politics among an affluent minority in the US. As Peter Novick clarifies in startling detail in The Holocaust in American Life (1999), the Shoah ‘didn’t loom that large’ in the life of America’s Jews until the late 1960s. Only a few books and films touched on the subject. The film Judgment at Nuremberg ...”

“... professional humiliation. In the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford the curtain rose with Antony on his knees pleasuring the Egyptian queen of Frances de la Tour. Even the jaded eyebrows of Stratford went up a bit at this and just before it transferred to the Barbican Alan rang and began without preamble: ‘I’m sure you will be relieved ...”

“... the commander of the US forces, accosted his British counterpart, General de la Billière: ‘Hey Peter, what sort of country have you got there when they sack the prime minister halfway through a war?’It was not a coup, not even a very British one. But it was, as Charles Moore describes, the result of a very Tory conspiracy. Thatcher fell following the ...”

“... name of Tsentoroi – ‘i vsyo, that’s all.’ Civil servants, whom Russians ever since Peter the Great have called the chinovniki, also have to pay their dues. Every few months, all government employees, including policemen, doctors and teachers, are obliged to transfer a portion of their salary to the Akhmad-Khadzhi Kadyrov Fund, or FAK, a private ...”

“... the idea that those who came to maturity in these years were ‘socially mobile’: that they rose to a higher position in society than their (working-class) parents. And it was of course true that these changes, along with rising prosperity and better public services, did improve the lives of large sections of the population, though the class position of ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... that finally detonated the old system. In a ten-month period in 1974, the price of a barrel of oil rose 228 per cent. The OPEC revolution turned the oil-procurement system upside down. America was now obliged to fashion a new oil strategy from the ruins of the cartel, one in which the Saudi ‘special relationship’ loomed even larger, and had also to learn ...”

“... his hands and cried out: ‘Oh God, oh God.’ The accounts of the Eliots’ married life found in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot or Lyndall Gordon’s or, now, in Carole Seymour-Jones’s book may disagree about the primary cause of the failure of the marriage or the degree of Tom and Vivienne’s responsibility for it, but all of them repeat the same ...”

“... have known of later privatisations in Pinochet’s Chile. Until Bel’s recent research it was Peter Drucker, in his writings about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the ...”