“... relations’ in the aftermath of McDaid’s death. But it’s far from encouraging to read that one of McDaid’s relatives was arrested barely a month after the killing on charges of ‘incitement to hatred’ and ‘behaviour likely to stir up hatred’. According to the charge sheet, Peter Neill ...”

“... many extended passages of high style in A Journey, but those there are make a lasting impression. Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, he says, made a formidable political team. ‘Peter would slip into the castle through a secret passageway and, by nimble footwork and sharp and incisive thrusts of the rapier, cleave his ...”

“... and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden agenda’, long ago exposed to the light of Freudian day: in this Oedipal reading, Mozart’s ‘unconscious rage against his father, disciplinarian and exploiter’, is reflected in Don Giovanni’s unsuccessful attempt ...”

“... There have been other general books, but Woodcock’s has been by far the most successful. Peter Marshall’s Demanding the impossible is a broad survey – an expensive hardback, efficiently written, similarly designed for ordinary readers but with plenty of notes to please scholars. Like Woodcock, Marshall is close to the subject, neither an academic ...”

“... Great Apes looks down on them for comic relief. Each is, in its own way, amply unsuccessful. Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow made a stir a couple of years ago. Its plot was muddled, but it did have an ingratiating heroine and lots of ethnic local colour; and things happened too fast for you to think about them much. It was a good enough ...”

“... of saving at the time.’) Then Larkin (who had published two novels while still in his twenties) read his friend’s typescript, making fundamental and detailed suggestions for improvement. Leader provides an excellent account of Larkin’s contribution to the revising of what became Lucky Jim, a contribution, Larkin was prone to feel later in his life, that ...”

“... to these matters can consist of little beyond subjective fantasy. It is hazardous enough to read one’s own preoccupations into the work of a poet, but at least a poem is evidence that the concepts in it were present in the poet’s mind, whether or not they were part of his private experience when he was not writing poetry. If music is combined with ...”

“... Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a heart attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal ...”

“... For us​ ,’ Steffen Ahrends told his son Peter, who was born in Berlin in 1933, ‘the history of architecture started with the Soviet 1917 revolution.’ It wasn’t entirely a joke. For many designers in the Weimar Republic, and for subsequent generations of modernist hardliners, 1917 had made possible a reconstruction of life on collective, egalitarian and, above all, planned lines ...”

“... I am reading Dehaene’s book. I think I can process the word ‘occupied’ – the last word I read before putting the book aside for a moment – while also taking in the rattle. Can I really? It does take a certain kind of settling-in, but there they are, the two of them. Maybe this is a case where the pair comprises one item? Some ways of counting items ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd has written a benign life of T.S. Eliot. Given the malignity visited on Eliot, this is a good deal. Fair-minded, broad-minded and assiduous, here is a thoroughly decent book. It has none of the sleazy sanctimony of Robert Sencourt’s biography, or the vanity of T.S. Matthews’. That it is a feat to be without spite is coincidentally manifested by the appearance of Geoffrey Grigson’s Recollections ...”

“... technical intelligence. There is recent evidence that from 1976 to 1983 the KGB was able to read France’s diplomatic traffic with its Moscow embassy by bugging an embassy teleprinter which it had intercepted in transit. The main foreign priority of Soviet Intelligence today is probably the acquisition of advanced technology. According to evidence ...”

“... and consultancies, or the media circuit might beckon. Such soft landings aren’t available to Peter Mandelson, whose long-deserved fall is finally absolute. Mandelson was fired as ambassador to the United States in September, after the release of an initial tranche of files relating to the sex criminal and financier Jeffrey Epstein. These files ...”

“... Front: his emotional repertoire consists of being glacial, or being condescending. He sits down to read Rupert Brooke near the graves of a major and a private, and muses thus: ‘I cannot help thinking of the two together and of the greater value of the one. What a pity it is that the same little piece of lead takes away as easily a brilliant life and one that ...”

“... pile-up of this magnitude, however much he/we might wish to hail the editorial labours of Peter Davison and his assistants. Davison has been working on this edition for almost twenty years and, as he has not been slow to tell us, has had to overcome a succession of irritating setbacks – mostly to do with the shoddiness and indecisiveness of ...”