“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... work by which he is – invisibly – best known to modern popular culture outside Russia, via the Peter Shaffer play it inspired, Amadeus, rendered onto the big screen by Miloš Forman. In Mikhailovskoye, as well as parts of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote the historical drama Boris Godunov, finished the long poem The Gypsies, wrote the prologue to his first ...”

“... did not want his journalists writing independently of his papers so when Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard decided, in the wake of Dunkirk, to write an instant book denouncing the Fascist sympathisers and appeasers who had brought things to this pass, it had to be done anonymously. The result, Guilty Men, though written in just four days, was to be the ...”

“... his stories by Harper’s. Three of his novels were filmed (one by a remarkable artist, Peter Ustinov). His plays were produced in the West End, by Tyrone Guthrie, Ustinov, Gielgud. He won medals for two of his children’s books, and the War Office commissioned books from him, as did Drambuie and Rio Tinto Zinc. His works were finally issued by ...”

“... Telegraph, Norman Tebbit appears as a crazed, bloodthirsty infantryman, with Douglas Hurd and Peter Walker mounted behind him, apparently duetting the Iron Duke’s quip: ‘I don’t know what effect he will have upon the enemy, but, by God, he terrifies me.’ Garland’s cartoon is derivative and poorly executed (it has nothing to feast the eye), but ...”

“... on the feasts of Christ and Mary and the times of fasting. Legenda means ‘material to be read’; saints’ legends took their name from the fact that they were read in church on the appropriate days. Grounded in sacred presence, integrated with the rhythms of summer and winter, seed time and harvest, the Legend ...”

“... to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that ...”

“... to the Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge, when the British Museum assistant George Smith first read the cuneiform in 1872, he ‘jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself’.The tablet was one of more than thirty thousand that formed the Royal Library at Nineveh ...”

“... seemingly indifferent to the internal regulation of its direction. It is this focus which informs Peter Goodrich’s Languages of Law. The book appears to be a collection of disparate essays, oddly connected and repetitive, but which nevertheless circle back obsessively to the question of how the law sustains its own authority. Goodrich continually queries ...”

“... The dead writers,’ Eliot said, ‘are that which we know.’ They are also, Peter Ackroyd might want to add, that which we don’t know we know or wish we knew better, agents of prodigious but incomplete hauntings. From The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde to Chatterton, Ackroyd has shown himself an adept in the speech of such ghosts ...”

“... install itself in every part of the Labour machine’. The authors ‘expose the machinations of Peter Mandelson ... whose regime and methods can be rivalled only by that of Bernard Ingham’ etc. In fact, although Heffernan and Marqusee have written the book in an ‘openly partisan spirit’ (we ‘have an indictment to make and we make no apologies for ...”

“... vaguely coloured with nostalgia. They don’t engage my imagination. Even as a child, though I read about polar explorers and enjoyed the mise-en-scène of polar bears, white-outs, ice floes and the rest, the word ‘north’ exercised over me little of the magic it has for so many others, including Kavenna and ...”

“... evidence, and that misinterpreted. It is certainly difficult to see how anyone who has actually read Buchan, Sapper and Yates can yoke the first with the other two. For the difference in flavour – between decency and indecency – compare these three bouts between hero and foreigner. Hannay v. Colonel von Stumm in Greenmantle: He half tripped over a ...”

“... of the belief that Hitler has a specific history in German Romanticism. It is a delusion which Peter Paret and especially William Vaughan are quite ready to take for reality, while Norman Stone’s own dreams about ‘the positive qualities of Hitler, his real achievements’ (thus Professor J.H. Plumb’s Introduction) aid and abet it: if Hitler was some ...”