“... armistice talks. But it makes no sense to discuss whether or not it might have occurred had Peter the Great rather than Charles XII lost at Poltava. Too many events have intervened to establish any plausible chains of causation. On the other hand, the price of the counter-factual closer to the event is that it will fail to illuminate the broad spectrum ...”

“... or Crichton himself discredited in some fabricated scandal. Crichton’s insipid hero, Detective Peter Smith, is an officer in the diplomatic section of the Los Angeles Police Department. His task is to investigate a murder committed during the glitzy opening party for the American headquarters of the Nakamoto Corporation. The narrative proceeds on a twin ...”

“... where else do you get a name like that?’ To us cocky British snobs who call the great man ‘Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ and don’t much mind what he called himself, the ‘mistake’ of the tourists is not tragical. But, for William Gaddis, this sort of ignorance leads up to the climax of The Recognitions, where his most admirable character – Stanley, the ...”

“... the grave on how the work should be published. In a forthcoming essay on Walpole as an historian, Peter Sabor comments on the way that ‘the preposterously Gothic arrangements by which Walpole preserved his history unread until generations after his death played into the hands of expurgators, conflators, and hostile commentators.’ Yet the passages now ...”

“... and tweed, shooting and croquet and tennis, and holidays in huge hotels in Torquay or the South of France. There is a splendidly evocative picture of Galsworthy ‘in his Oxford rooms’ with a chum, ‘studying racing form at breakfast’ while a servant hovers against the dark wallpaper. All this, with Harrow, Lincoln’s Inn and a private income, went to ...”

“... from the authorities in more than one country, and ended up in Mexico; Wolff was arrested in France in 1943 after the Germans took control of the unoccupied zone, but died in hospital before he could be transported to Auschwitz. Other exiled journalists tried to scrape a living in countries they didn’t know, often producing low-circulation and not very ...”

“... my aunt brought Patrick to the London flat, our daughter Candy was already three months old.’ Peter Pan had the windows locked against him when he tried to go home and saw a new baby in his cot; at least they let Patrick in. But Johnnie was a journalist and six weeks after Patrick arrived, his paper sent him to Paris. ‘I went too but we left the ...”

“... human evil. The unvarnished records of the Auschwitz trials have yielded a work of some stature in Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, and even the sub-genre of the memoirs of Hitler’s dog has achieved ironic elevation in Grass’s Hundejahre. Closer to home, Michael Hamburger has devoted himself to bringing German poetry before us and to maintaining its ...”

“... an improviser, he oversaw economic growth per capita between 1997 and 2010 which exceeded that of France, Germany and the United States – and far exceeds Britain’s feeble growth rate since then. He almost halved the number of children living in poverty, and after his administration the elderly were no longer poorer on average than other Britons. He pushed ...”

“... the attempt made in the mid-Eighties by the millionaire property developer and art collector Peter Palumbo to extend his power as chairman of the trustees and to reduce the role of the director, Alan Bowness, to that of a manager. The political circumstances in which this coup nearly succeeded are not neglected, but more context and commentary are ...”

“... expected to lie awake pondering the logical status of such propositions as ‘the present king of France is bald.’ Despite his dependence on women he accused the whole sex of ‘triviality of soul’. In his letters he spoke copiously and freely to a great many correspondents. It is hard to read the dozens of amorous effusions here quoted without some ...”

“... with the desire to find the laws governing them. The British took the Rosetta Stone, but allowed France to keep Geoffroy, as well as his collection of crocodiles, ichneumons, and mummified ibises, which he had threatened to burn rather than cede to the victors. Geoffroy was one of nature’s romantics: ostensibly a descriptive anatomist, he investigated the ...”

“... a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and the European union’. It strikes me that Lake devalues the past, though, when he plays down its connections with ...”

“... a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War ...”

“... bemusement and indifference. Historians such as Christopher Haigh, Alexandra Walsham and Peter Marshall have reconstructed a social world of coexistence between people of different faiths, who lived what Haigh once called ‘an ambidextrous religious life’. This inclination to ‘get along and get by’ was exported to the New World along with the ...”