“... apocalypses in the New Testament (and therefore not accepted as such by all Biblical scholars) is Peter’s vision in Acts. Falling into a trance on the roof of a house, Peter sees the sky open up and a great sheet being lowered down. In it are animals of every possible sort, ‘whatever walks or crawls or flies’. A voice ...”

“... as in Eisenhower’s America, but dull nonetheless, not to mention smug. It is not surprising that Peter Hennessy should call his monumental history Having It So Good, nor that Dominic Sandbrook should call his equally monumental recent history of the late 1950s and early 1960s Never Had It So Good. This neatly illustrates the drawback of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... companies. This heterogeneity is reflected in the variety of attitudes one finds when reading about the Underground, or when talking to people who use the escalators and to people who work with them. The ignorant but not unreasonably impatient public fails to see why heavy-duty escalators seem to behave less well than the household appliances they ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It was​ in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950 ...”

“... plays such a large part in Lynch’s scheme; and why the film’s great set piece involves Watts reading for a part in a film. The same sense of deception and truth preying on each other governs the photography (by Peter Deming). We see pieces of a world or a person, corners of rooms, gardens full of ferns, characters ...”

“... that knows it’s not a biography but a picture. It looks wonderful – the cinematographer is Peter Suschitzky – but this only makes it feel more like a movie. The voices are a clue as well. Michael Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud speak with flawless English accents, as does Sarah Gadon as Emma, Jung’s all too perfect wife. Knightley ...”

“... case, however fine Tamarisk Row and its successor are (and they are), it’s unlikely you’d be reading this essay. Murnane’s international reputation, which has grown to speculations of a Nobel, rests on his novels and stories of the 1980s and 1990s, especially his 1982 masterpiece, The Plains. These are the works that have drawn comparisons to Borges ...”

“... and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and shrivel when confronted by Watt’s ambitious, analytical and ...”

“... name four. I had the impression he was slightly demented himself. He stumbled a few times while reading the Last Rites and we got the giggles. He left, and my father continued rattling until the next evening and then the breathing really did stop.We put a wild flower from the garden in his hands and folded them on his chest. His fingers were the same colour ...”

“... fallen in love. The object of his love was the British Museum – or rather, the great circular reading room of the library (now renamed the British Library, stripped of all its grandeur and romance and moved to the Euston Road) that was then the hidden heart of the Museum. His favourite seat is said to have been number L13.This last detail is not in Robert ...”

“... We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first husband, Peter and Jill’s father . . . you do, that’s good. They were Surrey people: they had a grand house in Caterham. Graham was a rich fellow, talented, energetic, generous; he’d made most of his money as a printer: he published the daily stock exchange ...”

“... book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984), was a painstaking re-creation of the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. He topped that with an account of Fred and Rosemary West’s killing careers, Happy like Murderers (1998). The first resembles a documentary; the second is more like a novel in the sense of being more artfully shaped and ...”

“... a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of idolatry. Such writers ...”