“... of a fellow, six and a half feel if he was an inch ... He was in uniform, and the black-and-white ribbon of the Iron Cross showed at a buttonhole. His tunic was all wrinkled and strained as if it could scarcely contain his huge chest ... He had a great, lazy, smiling face with a square cleft chin which stood out beyond the rest. His brow retreated and ...”

“... Bridge, but by the end the Dorati family’s vineyard and the nearby ‘clapboard church with the white steeple’ have come to loom much larger than anyone could have expected. Thanksgiving at the Doratis’ may fall short of Christmas at Dingley Dell in some respects, but it is here in a harvest festival atmosphere that John’s real claims on Liz’s ...”

“... among diatribes of this sort it comes at the weary end of a line that stretches through books by Peter Blake, Brent Brolin, Robert Venturi and others right back to Jane Jacobs’s epoch-breaking attack on Le Corbusier in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, over twenty years ago. Of course, all this has guaranteed Wolfe a readership whose anti-modern ...”

“... Brazilian Adventure?’ the young travelogue aspirant ventured to ask, to be crisply told that Peter Fleming’s book had sold as an adventure, not as a book about Brazil. Fleming’s two prewar travel books, the Brazilian one and News from Tartary, which is still better, succeeded so well because their author instinctively took to heart the advice of ...”

“... presumably referring to her heroin addiction. Friends and mentors over the years – Rhys Davies. Peter Owen, Brian Aldiss – have made considerable efforts to dispel such feelings of uncase by stressing how smart and cheerful she, was how little her drug addiction appeared to affect her. Such loyal friends did not wish her to be regarded as a pathological ...”

“... was either downplayed or seen as a justifiable punishment. Ten million Germans suffered in what Peter Gatrell describes as ‘a reckoning on a grand and terrible scale’: 2.7 million were expelled from the Sudetenland and other parts of Czechoslovakia; six million were driven out of Poland and hundreds of thousands from Yugoslavia, Hungary and ...”

“... Peter Green’s splendid new translation of Catullus makes quite a substantial volume: more than three hundred pages in all, with an introduction, parallel text in Latin and English, notes, glossary and index. Such treatment doesn’t feel quite right for this ‘new witty booklet, all fresh-polished with abrasive’, as Catullus describes the book he dedicates to Cornelius Nepos in poem 1 ...”

“... map of sensory life, from some (undetermined) beginning point long ago right up to the present. Peter Charles Hoffer, one of sensory history’s leading exponents, acknowledges both approaches and, to a degree, tries them out in his own study. But his central aim is something more. He wishes to give sensory experience a dynamic role in history as a whole ...”

“... had just left jail. Gregory Corso was bumming around Europe, urging Ginsberg and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky to sail with him to India to find his now ex-girlfriend Hope Savage. The married Beats, Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger, were studying Zen in Kyoto but planned a pilgrimage to India to see the birthplace of Buddhism. It’s hard to imagine how such ...”

“... simply relished the humiliation of the Foreign Office. Besides, the political chief involved was Peter Carrington – a remote figure to the mass of newish Tory MPs, whom he had failed to cultivate. High and mighty, he was from the ‘other place’ and politically defenceless in the Commons. I shall always believe that he resigned because he imagined he had ...”

“... women became a primary subject of her art, and she often featured her young sons, Hans and Peter, in her pictures of proletarian families. Searching self-portraits – Kollwitz produced more than a hundred in all media – also punctuate her oeuvre, which is meticulously surveyed in the current retrospective at MoMA (until 20 July). Largely ...”

“... of draught animals nor of the wheel. The Anasazi also produced beautiful pottery decorated with white and black geometric designs, built sophisticated irrigation systems and erected astronomical and solar observatories. Man Corn, however, makes no attempt to deal in detail with any of these aspects of Anasazi society. Instead, it concentrates ...”

“... and whimsicalities into the author of ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ and ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’.Stevens met Elsie Viola Moll (née Kachel) in June 1904, during a visit to his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania. He had been living in New York since 1900, and had discovered the hard way that ‘the world holds an unoccupied niche ...”

“... were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart no bigger than an orange seed has ceased to beat.’ From his first novel, The Hunters of 1957, a description of fuel tanks jettisoned by ...”