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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lines distributed among ten stanzas – the sort of poetry mathematics of which Peter Reading, an admirer of Armitage’s work, is master), but altogether another to write 1000 lines to a year-end deadline, not least when attempting an essentially public poem which reflects on our times and recollects some recent headline-grabbing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... everything that had happened to him in the previous two years’; while the marriage between Sir Peter Teazle and his young bride in The School for Scandal is clearly based on the wooing of Eliza Linley by an elderly suitor before Sheridan came on the scene. And it is, of course, ‘no accident’ that The Rivals starts where most romantic drama would ...”

“... from tabloid libraries: Freddie Mills posing in his trunks (low angle, hard shadows), the murdered Peter Arne (in a blizzard of newsprint dots), Charles Hawtrey having a very bad hair day after a house fire in Deal. Seabrook loves the reforgotten, the misrepresented. None of his heroes will be acknowledged in The Oxford Companion to English Literature ...”

“... Noël could recreate by ear on the piano when they got home. To what extent he ever learned to read music remains unclear. He certainly had no lessons.The Cowards’ vacillating finances saw them move to Surrey and then to Battersea, at which point Violet read an article in the Daily Mirror about Lila Field and her new ...”