“... precision and wit of a Fowler ... a delight to read and a mine of useful instruction’, while Peter Clayton, in the sterner fashion befitting the Sunday Telegraph, thought that ‘it’s not often you get a hook so worthy of purpose, so forthright, so amusing and yet so balanced.’ The reviewer for the Scotsman, traditionally anonymous, was given pride ...”

“... translation is uneven but improves as it goes along; whoever was responsible for the final proof-reading should be sent back in time and made to march on Moscow. Philip Longworth’s elegant account of Alexis Romanov, Tsar of Russia from 1645 to 1676, claims to be ‘the first full biography ... in any language for 150 years’. This is misleading as another ...”

“... years later, she married a future postmaster; they had three children – Basil and Winifred and Peter. She published a few stories in magazines, and was sneered at by her husband’s relatives. In her sixties she wrote three books which made her famous as an articulate inhabitant of that strange planet, the countryside. The books in the trilogy called Lark ...”

“... writing with every semblance of scruple about distant parts of the world. The Times correspondent, Peter Nichols, recently told his readers that El Salvador was a microcosm of Latin America, and he is the author of a book that lovingly details the varieties of the Italian peninsula. His The Pope’s Divisions scorns any such discrimination for the larger ...”

“... John Arden’s confidence in animating this period (and there is evidence of enormous background reading) is considerable; it is impressive; it is unusual. But it is unusual chiefly as a sustained exercise in elaboration and obfuscation. By the end of the novel the reader is left with no very clear idea of the author’s purpose – yet it is quite clear ...”

“... else. Two authors are credited: ‘by Robert Katz’ is coupled with, in smaller type, ‘and Peter Berling’. The latter is a German film producer, who, says Katz, ‘cannot be called a Fassbinder person’. This formula is used throughout the book (sometimes reduced to FPs) to designate a groupie. Berling, however, is said to possess impressive ...”

“... Myself, I regret her refusal, since the account of her undercover work would make for fascinating reading. Imagine, if you will, the Secretary of State for War and 20-year-old Christine Keeler in bed, relaxing perhaps after their exertions. ‘Jack darling, that was . . . just . . . mmm.’ ‘It certainly was, my little lollipop.’ ‘Umm, Jack ...”

“... supporter all his life, votes for Thatcher, impressed by her conduct in the Falklands. He stops reading the Mirror in favour of the Sun. He buys his council flat. Maureen, meanwhile, discovers she has a talent for creative accounting, and gets a part-time job cooking the books for her hairdresser. A year later they move into a new house in Milton ...”

“... Since they also sing the praises of meekness as a political virtue, they are unlikely to prove Peter Mandelson’s favourite reading. Bobbio distinguishes four kinds of relation between ethics and politics. There are two brands of monism which respectively reduce ethics to politics (Hobbes) and politics to ethics ...”

“... I was so angry​ ,’ Peter Matthiessen said late in his life of his early days as a writer. ‘I was constantly in a contest … with my father.’ He’d grown up rich in Connecticut and New York, attended Yale, but found himself in ‘combat with the world’ for reasons he couldn’t understand; his early novels reflect this ...”

“... chapters, all by different hands. This was the remit set by the late M.M. Postan and his pupil Peter Mathias. Postan, who creatively dominated British economic history for so long, loved debate about the kind of framework or historical idiom one should employ for different purposes. The present volume, the penultimate one in the Cambridge Economic History ...”

“... and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.’ It is in pursuit of such myths that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda set out for the promised land; they learn the realities of life in the colony the hard way. Carey set himself against Dickens more explicitly nine years later, in Jack Maggs (1997), an imaginative reworking of Great ...”

“... and how much more he could tell if only his mouth was not what he was pleased to call closed.’ Peter Wright’s Spycatcher (1987) got the same kind of treatment; even Stella Rimington rubbishes it. Nobody loved him, whether they accepted his charges – a Russian mole in MI5, the ‘Wilson plot’ – or not. This is understandable. Ministers (like ...”

“... dimension referred to in the blurb, and rather think I don’t need to. My first reading, before any reviews appeared, concurs with what I took Peter Ackroyd to be saying on Kaleidoscope, that the bulk of the narrative can be read and enjoyed in a moderately literal way as a mystery story set in ...”

“... the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d ...”