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“... of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the disbelieving French that Hitler would attack through the Ardennes, and who was later appropriated by Eisenhower to become his chief of Intelligence; and ...”

“... to express both the attraction and the repulsion awakened in him by Nazism and Hitler. To turn to Peter Longerich’s Hitler: A Life, superbly translated by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe, is to re-encounter the sober, appraising diction that Knausgaard deplores in Kershaw’s writing. Longerich is in no doubt that his subject was emotionally ...”

“... Chamberlains, who live in Washington Square West, are recent transplants from New York City. Peter, a fortysomething local news anchor and Alix, a 33-year-old writer and Instagram influencer, are parents to Catherine, a newborn, and Briar, an inquisitive three-year-old. Their mother pretends she is still living in NYC, a trick maintained by means of ...”

“... advised along those lines by his national defence procurement officer, an old friend called Peter Levene whom Heseltine had promoted to high office, in controversial circumstances, at a starting salary of £95,000 a year. Levene had been chairman of United Scientific Holdings, whose recent success had been based to a large degree on the cooperation of ...”

“... Balzac’s significance in the history of the novel was fully apparent by 1905, when Henry James said that his ‘achievement remains one of the most inscrutable, one of the unfathomable, final facts in the history of art’. Of course, not all Balzac’s contemporaries agreed on the quality of the work; some complained that his prose was often ...”

“... have to be particularly hideous. It is impossible to give a full list, but among those chosen were Peter Quennell, Feliks Topolski, Alan Ross, Kenneth Tynan and Charles Addams, as well as a lot of extras with names like Old B., the Bastard and Chuff. She did not waste her time with intellectuals, but absorbed their appreciation of art and literature. She has ...”

“... go through these doors in a weekend, many 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 ...”

“... like Patrick White and A.D. Hope were greeted with candid derision, and nobody had heard of Clive James.* When, at one of the actual Festival’s talk-ins, I said that it was odd to find Peter Porter missing from various standard anthologies of Australian verse, I was given the clear impression that P.P. had simply got what ...”

“... enjoys abundant affection from crime-readers but not quite the esteem that Mesdames Rendall and James reap, it may be because his solutions are sometimes less than convincing. We don’t always get the feeling that in his beginning was his end. The solution to Plaster Sinners does not seem inevitable, and is not particularly surprising. Added to that, the ...”

“... instead mildly successful at W.H. Smith and the Times Bookshop. The case was altered only by James Douglas, the editor (also in a crusader’s spirit) of the Sunday Express. Douglas decided, a month later, to feature the book and its photogenic author, in her ‘severe’ smoking-jacket, as evidence of ‘the plague stalking shamelessly through public ...”

“... alive) like the entries in Who’s Who. There are some known names: Cecil Beaton, Jasper Johns, James Jones, John Mortimer, Patricia Neal, William Styron, Andy Warhol. Among the rest are antique dealers, decorators, magazine editors, a ‘freelance music co-ordinator for fashion shows’, a princess ‘internationally concerned with matters of spiritual ...”

“... rationing in order to keep up prices. Anyone caught smuggling rhubarb paid with his life. In 1727 Peter the Great tried relaxing things, only to touch off such a tremendous surge in trade (as evidenced by the London customs records) that the court came to the conclusion that the monopoly had been very much to its financial advantage, and acted ...”

“... aie? ‘Half the poetry of the 18th century is probably written by him,’ a character says in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton. Yet he appeals equally to defenders and opponents of the canon. Chatterton was convinced of his own talent and ambitious to be recognised as one of the great English poets; but he chose to attract public attention with pastiche ...”

“... History of Ancient Art by Winckelmann in 1764 to the appearance of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans in 1941, his focus is on the arts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that is, on high modernism. His range of interests is impressive: Rancière delves into the poetry of Whitman, the acrobatic performances of the Hanlon-Lees ...”

“... rights. The tough guys of Chartism are here as well. From Manchester there is the twice imprisoned James Leach, whose Stubborn Facts from the Factories was milked by Engels for his Condition of the Working Class in England (Leach ended up in the 1850s as a soda-water manufacturer). Also from Manchester is the argumentative Reginald Jones Richardson, another ...”