“... the grave on how the work should be published. In a forthcoming essay on Walpole as an historian, Peter Sabor comments on the way that ‘the preposterously Gothic arrangements by which Walpole preserved his history unread until generations after his death played into the hands of expurgators, conflators, and hostile commentators.’ Yet the passages now ...”

“... a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War ...”

“... magazine Oxford Poetry in 1930. In his excellent introduction to this definitive Complete Poetry, Peter Robinson characterises Spencer as an unconfident poet who, when his luck was in, wrote poems that were ‘profoundly uncertain’: ‘within his small oeuvre, poem after poem sounds true. That sound sense of reliable poetry was achieved under the shadow of ...”

“... that Europe acts only if the rights of multinationals and banks are at stake: Brussels gave the green light to negotiations over new IMF loans only after central bank independence had been assured. Concerns over the independence of the judiciary will be dealt with by the European Court, which usually takes for ever. Suspicion of Brussels has been encouraged ...”

“... said that.’ The next day: ‘Up to see TB in the flat. Another Austin Powers moment. Yellow/green underpants and that was it. I said what a prat he looked. He said I was just jealous – how many prime ministers have got a body like this?’ There is a flirtatious edge to this. Martin Amis, in a piece reporting on Blair’s last weeks in office, also ...”

“... change the nature of the regime? Either way, the true nature of the protests is being missed. The green colours adopted by the Mousavi supporters and the cries of ‘Allahu akbar!’ that resonated from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness suggested that the protesters saw themselves as returning to the roots of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, and ...”

“... outward glance that we are likewise her subjects. Their fluctuating satins, the swags of laurel-green curtain behind them and the late June evening clouds all rise and fall to an inner rhythm that is unmistakeably amorous. To view this painting is to get tossed up in that convulsion, but it’s also to recognise that its wellsprings do not belong to ...”

“... the SWP had recruited various politicians and celebrities to an Anti-Nazi League. They included Peter Hain, an anti-apartheid activist who was now working for the postal workers’ union and had recently joined the Labour Party; Neil Kinnock, an up-and-coming Welsh MP from the party’s far left; and the actress Miriam Karlin, famous for playing a bolshie ...”

“... Sayers tried the same trick in The Documents in the Case, her only crime novel not featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, but it was her least successful book: too many competing voices drowned out the plot. (Van Dine’s 16th rule: ‘A detective novel should contain … no literary dallying with side-issues … They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant ...”

“... was variation in colour. Chemical compounds containing strontium burn red; copper carbonate adds green; iron filings make showers of golden sparkles.China’s appetite for novelty also led to chains of multiple ignitions and wooden dragons spitting fire. The 16th-century scholar Feng Ying Ching wrote about a kind of bomb from which sprang ground rats and ...”

“... pretty quickly – as Suite at the Majestic. That same translation became The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, then The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is ...”

“... and crystals, beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a ...”

“... wherever he found them’ – Harry Palmer ‘came to epitomise the decline of deference’. (Peter Hitchens, in contrast, uses the framework of national identity in The Abolition of Britain, published in 1999, to issue a diatribe against the ‘social revolution’ – the disappearance of restraint, family values and ‘much-mended leather ...”

“... was Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International, a slim green volume published in 1974, crammed with photographs, illustrations and comic strips, compiled and annotated by Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate ...”

“... For Wearing, contemporary drama (the ‘journalism of the imagination’) was the loser. Even Peter Flannery’s triumphant mid-1990s nine-parter Our Friends in the North was shown despite rather than because of the prevailing BBC ethos. Michael Jackson, then head of BBC2, described the serial as ‘without doubt the contemporary drama event of the ...”