“... something strange to him. At last the unused plates, along with a few boomerangs, come back to France, but without the photographer, who has drifted away from his project after meeting a man who ‘avoided all mirrors ... Needless to say, he could no longer be sure of what he now looked like.’ Learning from this encounter that ‘the shadows of ...”

“... In contrast, the entirely voluntary resignations in 1958 of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, and his two junior ministers, Nigel Birch and Enoch Powell, came down from above not ‘up from below’. The quarrel was a Cabinet one. In his resignation speech Thorneycroft claimed that he ‘alone in the Cabinet stood against ...”

“... also a shift in the public perception of ‘journalism’ (a coinage of the 1830s, imported from France). Those who wrote for daily or weekly newspapers in the late 18th century were generally looked down on as hacks, whereas the contributors to the quarterlies were seen as gentlemen (they were mostly, though not exclusively, male). They were members of the ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... he gives us this short paragraph about Viri’s general state of being: His friends were Arnaud, Peter, Larry Vern. All friends are friends in a different way. Arnaud was his closest friend; Peter, his oldest. But what comes next is this: He lingered before the counter, his eye passing over coloured bolts of ...”

“... reminiscences over the teacups. The story that Mai Zetterling told of her encounter with Peter Sellers and Kingsley Amis, at the time of the filming of Only Two Can Play, moves easily enough from life to fiction. ‘Want to see my Aertexes?’ asks the disgraceful Rex Martin, the Amis offprint. What happens is that world fits within world like a ...”

“... rounds of Hollywood dinner parties (among the guests at one of them are Warren Beatty, Peter Bogdanovich, Ryan O’Neal, Steven Spielberg, James Coburn, Dudley Moore, Tuesday Weld and Angie Dickinson), peddling movie ideas (Kathleen trumped him here, too, selling her screenplay for Agatha) and driving to Las Vegas to catch Shirley MacLaine ...”

“... and the Colonial World. The early chapters consider a number of classic accounts of anthropophagy. Peter Hulme shows how the brief report of the ship’s doctor on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493, itself based on circumstantial evidence, was blown up out of all proportion by subsequent editors. Four or five human bones stolen from an abandoned village on ...”

“... because of Volkswagen. America ran the world because of General Motors. Italy made Fiats and France made Peugeots, Japan made Toyotas, and even the Russians, struggling along the highway towards modernity, had the easily underestimated Lada. Was making cars once an indicator of national self-sufficiency? Is it ...”

“... with other women writers coming up at the same time, such as Annie Ernaux and Marguerite Duras in France and Monique Laederach and Anne-Lise Grobéty in Switzerland. She did not. ‘I don’t like women’s books,’ she said in 2004. ‘They go on about marriage, divorce, emotional states, children’; their authors have ‘nothing to say’. When asked to ...”

“... for his technique. True, he spent a lot of Beaverbrook’s money on regular lunches at L’Ecu de France but many of his guests would have sung like canaries without a cork being drawn. To take just one example, a frequent lunch companion from the start was Fred (later Sir Frederick) Brundrett, who when Pincher got to know him was deputy to Sir Henry Tizard ...”

“... interest – and his bosses had known what he was doing. In his closing remarks, the prosecutor, Peter Wright, picked out something said by another of the defendants, Ben O’Driscoll, who had been a deputy news editor at the Sun. In 2010, Virginia Wheeler’s ‘Chelsea Copper’ had told her that a singer’s sister had been impaled on railings. ‘She’s ...”

“... series presenting adaptations of Sade’s works by Buñuel, von Stroheim, Pasolini, Guy Debord, Peter Brook and Nagisa Oshima. Meanwhile, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade has published its fourth volume of Sade, a lavish 1150-page edition of the great erotic writings: 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Justine. The works span the decade ...”

“... remarked with an icy stare to a writer from the New York Times in 1993 – and having lived in France for fifty years, he underestimated the Anglo-American appetite for dirt. He had known for a while that an American biographer, Dean King, was on his case, and had told his friends to give King nothing. But Fenton’s and the BBC’s revelations forced King ...”

“... the Turkish sack of Constantinople and the rise of Protestantism. He had predicted the reign of Peter the Great and Frederick the Great. Tantalisingly for Greeks in the 1750s, he also offered a vision of what awaited their descendants: an ‘era of destruction of the Mohammedans’ and the resurrection of an Orthodox empire with the help of the ‘kings of ...”