“... of the Annales school, considered him a master, and he not only foreshadows but is cited by Green-blatt, Foucault and, most sympathetically, Geertz. In the genealogy of cultural history, however, Burckhardt may turn out to be something of a marsupial wolf. The major branches in the lineage of Post-Modernist history follow a very different line, through ...”

“... John Huston’s Beat the Devil. He, too, is ruthless and unsmiling, and finding Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley cast up on his shores, plans to have them all shot. Bogart, however, discovers the sheikh’s soft spot, a secret passion for Rita Hayworth, and saves their lives by promising the humourless young man an introduction to ‘the ...”

“... of the Mario series), an Italian plumber (the eponymous Mario), his evil twin, Wario, and a small green dinosaur called Yoshi, and so on, all of the vehicles being driven by various friends and family members, and comprehensible and playable by anyone over the age of about four. Miyamoto has said he likes the idea of creating games a grandchild and a ...”

“... a family paper and listening in when London’s radical intelligentsia (the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, the Communard Louise Michel, the Fabian Annie Besant, and a host of suffragists and socialists) talked politics at their house on Russell Square. Emmeline started a business selling Arts and Crafts soft furnishings and decorations, but it ...”

“... philanderer, and an insecure snob who was evasive about his origins as Richard Russ from Willesden Green. The son, another Richard, believed his father had adopted a new identity to hide his shame at having abandoned his family – including an infant daughter dying of spina bifida – in order to pursue an affair with the married woman who became his second ...”

“... part of one when I was 12 or 13; I’d merely registered some of the titles on the spines of the green Penguin books on my parents’ shelves. This came as a shock – I’m still not sure why Marsh escaped me then, except that she may have seemed in some mysterious way more of a grown-up taste than Dorothy L. Sayers or Christie – but being a completist I ...”

“... goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ‘H.D. Imagiste’) she wasn’t swerving from prejudicial gendering so much as ridicule ...”

“... him, isn’t he?’ my granny would say. ‘Always had a dark side. Probably got it from his uncle Peter. He was like that as well. Morbid.’ ‘You’re just trying to draw attention to yourself,’ my father would say. ‘If something ever happens to you, I suppose you’ll want one of them statues to yourself up in the Glasgow Necropolis.’ ‘Yes,’ I ...”

“... language is one that we share with many other people – it is not a private language at all. Now Peter Hacker would express the thought differently, but in my opinion Rose and Hacker are not much at odds with each other. I do not think that Rose is philosophically tone deaf at all – but I did say that my prejudices are too close to his judgments for me to ...”

“... 2015. Obama was soon talking of bringing the war to a ‘responsible conclusion’. Miller credits Peter Lavoy, a veteran of the national security bureaucracy, with persuading Obama not to withdraw in 2016 and to keep 12,000 troops in place.From then on the occupation was a holding action. Most of the coalition soldiers were doing little fighting, with the ...”

“... a poor thing if I thank them here alphabetically. They include Mr Gerald Albertini, The Rt Hon. Peter Archer MP, Miss Amanda Aspinall, Dr Robert Aspinall, The Duke of Atholl, Miss Julie Battersea, Mr Tom Begg, Dr Kurt Benirschke, Mr Robin Birley, Mr Anthony Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan Clark, Sir David ...”

“... literary affiliations in James Hogg, and in such a novel as George Douglas’s The House with the Green Shutters. These are certainly present in the more sensational side of his work. But Twenty Thousand Streets has a quite different and much more English atmosphere, finding its models (and they are very obviously to be detected) in Dickens, J.B. Priestley ...”

“... of course, Victor proceeded to do, armed with a Bible and a carving knife. Morrison’s poem about Peter Sutcliffe is, on one level, a reworking of Auden’s ‘Victor’ which also manages to define the exact distance between Auden’s Thirties, and Morrison’s Eighties. Written in broad Yorkshire, in ringingly regular rhyme and metre, it looks, at first ...”

“... was spared to him – he fell beneath the first blow; and ere four days had passed since Rullion Green, the aged minister of God was gathered to his fathers. ‘Stevenson and Sons’, the maker’s mark on Edinburgh streetlamps (a company sideline), would always remind Stevenson of his failure to add to the family pride in a way which suited ...”

“... the 1935 lyric ‘To Be Hungry Is to Be Great’: The small yellow grass-onion, spring’s first green, precursor to Manhattan’s pavements, when plucked as it comes, in bunches washed, split and fried in a pan, though inclined to be a little slimy, if well cooked and served hot on rye bread is to beer a perfect appetiser – and the best part of it is they ...”