“... 1980s, when I was researching the commissioning and installation of the statue of Shakespeare by Peter Scheemakers in Westminster Abbey in 1741 as part of my doctorate, I discovered that one of the leading proponents and fundraisers for the project had been Susanna Ashley-Cooper, née Noel, Countess of Shaftesbury. It became clear that she was also the ...”

“... films as Gandhi (a severe treatment of the Raj), A Passage to India, and Heat and Dust, even the James Bond spectacular Octopussy, kept the Indian sub-continent securely in the public’s imagination. One of the most triumphant television productions of the decade was ITV’s dramatisation of Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ under the title The Jewel in the ...”

“... During the 1980s, a generation of American scholars – Ron Bush, Reed Dasenbrock, Michael Groden, James Longenbach, Lawrence Rainey – set those limits by mapping in great detail the relations between the various literary Modernists and examining the genesis of their major writings. Mutual influence is by no means the sole topic of such enquiries, but it ...”

“... of enslaving the imperial soul – the indignity and perplexity is captured with good humour by Peter Reading: I used to pepper my poetics with sophisticated allusions to dear Opera and divine Art (one was constantly reminded of A. du C. Dubreuil’s libretto for Piccinni’s Iphigenia in Tauris; one was constantly reminded of Niccolo di Bartolomeo da ...”

“... forth he met Butterly’ (a parody of the Gospel report – Matthew 26.75 – of the repentant Peter: ‘Going forth he wept bitterly’)? What difference, and how many differences, does it make if you translate it as: Und als er weiterging, traf er Butterly; or Und als er weiterging, traf er Bütterlich; or Und er ging hinaus und weinte Buttermilch; or ...”

“... either colour) and offers moderate but constructive proposals for the future, while James Prior, also in moderate terms, outlines his view of the role of the unions and describes those changes in the relevant law which are the objective of his own legislative programme. Tony Benn’s contribution is distinguished by its unique style, which reads ...”

“... twins put up for adoption were separated and used for psychological studies under the direction of Peter Neubauer, who never told either them or their parents that they were twins, or that they were being studied. In our day, the political bias has resurfaced in the racist hypotheses and conclusions of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell ...”

“... nick of time’ she discovered that he was a con man, a thief, a racketeer – in the employ of Peter Rachman, none other – and already married with children. I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of ‘living a lie’. I came to believe ...”

“... a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that the careers we might have chosen don’t matter very much: ‘Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes doubt ...”

“... of the Enlightenment dominated historical writing as late as the 1960s, and is best represented by Peter Gay’s two magisterial volumes published in 1966 and 1969. After Gay and Cassirer, two trends dominated Enlightenment history until Israel came on the scene. One situated the Enlightenment in a particular national context, giving little attention to the ...”

“... have recently provided the material for works by artists as different from each other as P.D. James, DV8 Physical Dance Theatre and David Lynch. Stephen Egger, an American academic and former policeman who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon, gives a definition/description of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A ...”

“... about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to ...”

“... this sort of browned-off tone does for a good deal of the verse in Bell’s Complete Poems. Peter Porter writes that Bell ‘knew more about poetry than any other writer I have known’, yet the number of Bell’s best poems is small. Clearly he was multi-talented. A stanza from a version of Corbiere shows fine use of form and acoustics. Bell can also ...”

“... and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní ...”

“... those which describe Thackeray conversing in his fiction with fellow novelists like Bulwer, G.P.R. James, Disraeli and Mrs Gore. Ray sees Thackeray in Vanity Fair as creating a work ‘quite as revolutionary as Ulyssess’ in its contradictions and subversions of popular fiction of the 1840s. Judging by his occasional mangling of titles (Charles Lever’s ...”