“... altarpieces, among them the ‘Assunta’ and the ‘Pesaro-Madonna’ for the Frari and the ‘St Peter Martyr’ for Zanipolo, without which the development of Baroque religious painting would be inconceivable. At the same time, he painted his celebrated mythologies for Alfonso d’Este (among them the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ in London), a cycle for which ...”

“... may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which launched Oasis, whose founder, Alan McGee, gave ...”

“... from a single mind; the demands on vocabulary, and, less predictably, on syntax, that made the reading, for example, of Gregory Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude such an enlarging experience. Translation upsets expectation, it extends the field of comparison, it forces even the sluggardly to re-evaluate and to re-contextualise. A ...”

“... work, and strong aversion to speculation beyond what is justified by the experimental results’. Peter Medawar once extolled imaginative guesswork as part of the scientific process. Perutz comments: ‘During the first 33 years of my own research imaginative guesswork proved useless: only after my colleagues and I had solved the structure of haemoglobin by ...”

“... Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the suppression or revelation of intimate materials – he does ...”

“... fashion for therapy and esteem which it partially prefigures, and to the essentially Stalinist reading of history which allows that ‘mistakes were made’ but maintains that it was either everybody’s fault or nobody’s. I can only say, for myself, that I don’t remember Vietnam in this way at all. There were days when it was almost physically ...”

“... this revisionist direction was taken in 1961 by the professional adviser to Magnusson’s series, Peter Sawyer. His The Age of the Vikings, one of the few recent studies not reissued this year, was a brilliant essay whose basic purpose was to explain the Viking explosion by arguing that there was nothing very exceptional about it. The Vikings were warrior ...”

“... and consultancies, or the media circuit might beckon. Such soft landings aren’t available to Peter Mandelson, whose long-deserved fall is finally absolute. Mandelson was fired as ambassador to the United States in September, after the release of an initial tranche of files relating to the sex criminal and financier Jeffrey Epstein. These files ...”

“... real target. For O’Toole’s linguistic psycho-genealogy is only a prelude to his Oedipal reading of the roots of the plays which goes way beyond young Sheridan’s entrapment ‘inside his father’s linguistic obsessions’. So, in The Rivals, the tempestuous relationship between the swashbuckling Jack Absolute and his irascible father is of course ...”

“... in The Art of Edward Thomas open out the issues, but a whiff of poet’s corner lingers on. Pace Peter Levi, it is not quite enough to celebrate Thomas as ‘certainly genuine, authentic, a true poet’. Under Storm’s Wing is a welcome reprint of Helen Thomas’s As it was and World without End, first published in 1926 and 1931. It also contains a ...”

“... as he examines the music with scrupulous care, bar by bar. His prose is technical but never dry. Reading his commentary on the B major fugue from Book I of the ‘48’, for instance, made me think anew about the way the subject rises, falls and rises again to a higher note, and how this contour is mirrored in the progress of the fugue, so that the highest ...”

“... promising to correct it. Perhaps name changes are of more general interest. In Decline and Fall Peter Chetwynde started without a Best and Dr Benito, the press secretary in Scoop, was originally Bonham Carter Jackson. Brideshead is much altered. Charles Ryder began as Peter Fenwick and was then in Debrett, the second son ...”

“... why Lord and Lady Wilde paid those school fees. Merlin Holland’s essay on his grandfather in Peter Raby’s Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde illuminates these appropriations by charting a series of significant errors through multiple versions of Wilde’s history. Holland takes us back to one of the most familiar scenes from the life of Wilde: the bad ...”

“... citizen, described by Robert Fagles as ‘arguably the finest Classicist of our day’, by Peter Green as one his nation ‘ought to bronze’, and by Jasper Griffin as a man ‘one would like to have as a friend’. In his long career he has written on many subjects: scholarly articles on the heroes of Attic drama in its golden age, unsentimental ...”

“... it, not for a new advance in painting, but by turning instead towards photography. Here his reading of Benjamin played a crucial role, but so did his growing recognition that photography presented a new challenge to the tradition of painting. Not only was it intrinsically realist: it had largely escaped the reach of the art market. Photographs could be ...”