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“... Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography is as much a history of characterisations of the city as a history of London itself. And although Ackroyd is most concerned with character in the sense of ‘a personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist’, readers of his previous writings will not be surprised to hear that many other meanings of the word also come into play – ‘distinctive features’, ‘essential peculiarity’, ‘nature, style’, certainly; but also ‘distinctive mark, evidence, or token’; ‘a cipher for secret correspondence’; and even ‘a cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem ...”

“... a virtual-reality show starring himself: Andrew Warhola playing ‘Andy’ better than Norma Jean Baker ever played ‘Marilyn’. In 1968, while Soviet tanks prepared to roll into the Czechoslovakia of Andy’s origins, Warhol was writhing in agony on the floor of his New York studio, shot by Valerie Solanas, a funny woman who had appeared in one of his ...”

“... she knew how to put her quietly in her place. ‘When I say, “I want to walk with you to Baker Street Station,” I mean I want to walk, and I want to walk with you, and I want to walk to Baker Street Station ... Better to take things simply and never go back on them, or analyse them, is not it?’ At the same time ...”

“... should express no opinion on this issue, and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasise this instruction. Even as the latest in ‘smart’ technology grinds and punctures the Iraqi military, this amazingly explicit enticement to Saddam is still being debated. Did the United States intend to ...”

“... culture, they’ve also carved out a general readership for themselves – witness Nicholson Baker on card catalogues – and joined forces with groups slighted by literary theorists: librarians, book dealers, local historians. Even the form of The Book History Reader privileges empirical case studies over theoretical generalisation, omitting the John ...”

“... than justice to the spirit of Wittgenstein’s work, a welcome alternative view is provided by Peter Hacker’s new book, Wittgenstein’s Place in 20th-Century Analytic Philosophy. This was written as a synoptic essay to accompany the huge four-part Analytical Commentary on the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, which he began working on twenty years ago ...”

“... lurking sadness in this volume, in spite of its many displays of verbal energy. Both Harrison and Peter Symes, who worked with him on a number of these pieces, insist quite rightly that the films are the thing, the texts ‘a poor substitute’, in Symes’s words, ‘for seeing them and hearing them’. I hate to ask why we could not have the films ...”

“... local vicar must have been as entertaining as it was scandalous and shocking. Thirty years later, Peter Vavasour from Yorkshire was prosecuted by the High Commission for similarly provocative words about the Christian doctrine of life after death. ‘Tush tush,’ he declared. ‘That is but a tricke of the clergye, to cause the people to beleeve … to gett ...”

“... micronutrients.Industrial wheat is a very efficient system if you ignore the consequences, the baker Andrew Whitley argued in Cereal, an excellent six-part audio series about wheat, broadcast last year through the Farmerama podcast. He covered many questions more or less ignored by Zabinski’s book, such as the taste of wheat and how it is milled. The ...”

“... opinion in the West did better than this. Among journalists, the Washington Post correspondents Peter Baker and Susan Glasser have produced a hard-hitting survey of the new Russia, Kremlin Rising, that puts the palliators of the Financial Times to shame.2 Among historians, Richard Pipes, at one with Malia in hostility to Communism, but in temperament ...”

“... Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw Malinowski, Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, George Orwell, Lord Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Toynbee, the Webbs, H.G. Wells or Leonard and Virginia Woolf? Unless clearly backed by an important publishing house or journal, as with Victor Gollancz or Kingsley ...”

“... This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he complained that Britain was investing in a vision of national isolation that Churchill had played up (and vastly exaggerated) in his wartime rhetoric. Do they even believe the ...”

“... he said. Too far from Figeac? I asked. The house was a distance from the town in the Lot with its baker and café, this was true, but in his phrasing there was, as there could be, an element of self-parody. A profile of him when he was president of the Cambridge Union in 1953, which he must have had a hand in writing himself, said: ‘It is far from the flash ...”

“... Even a truly vile and racist humiliator of women is ‘more sad than bad’. Wendy, meet Peter. One reason we can accept Kate’s disillusion with her work is the poignancy of her daughter’s need for her. (‘This is my mummy. Isn’t she lovely and tall?’ Emily says proudly when Kate comes with her to school.) Another is that her job is ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”