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“... uncannily like one of those advent-calendar mobiles they used to make out of coat-hangers on Blue Peter. That’s how it goes with structures of occult significance. Phenomena which seem loaded with brooding horror by evening have a funny way of looking limp, harmless and rather foolish by the rising light of day. In one section of the novel – Book II to be ...”

“... sitting back and thinking about Porter’s Boeotia’,† an essay which takes off from Peter Porter’s poem ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’, and which seems to have followed on from their interchange at the 1975 Poetry Australia ‘Write-In’. Athens and Boeotia are seen as ‘two models of civilisation between which Western man ...”

“... teacher, with whom she has ‘tremendous rows about her progressive approaches to teaching’. Peter’s Benthamite training has rendered him ‘traditional ... conformist ... reductionist ... mechanist’ (another lexicon of Holbrookian dirty words). Psychologically Peter has ‘buried the boy within him, very ...”

“... generation of writers is in William Cooper’s debt, just as the previous generation was in James Joyce’s debt’. But this comparison, justified though it may be, is bound to make the deliberately small-scale character of Cooper’s achievement all the more evident. Scenes from Metropolitan Life is largely about the withering of worldly ...”

“... after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about National Socialism.’ Wodehouse revised by James Lees-Milne. Fear of the mob; order and chaos. As with the world so with fiction: elephantine narratives, multiple versions running away from each other, stories begetting stories. How to keep it under control? ‘I’m talking about, I don’t know, about ...”

“... course, which was a burden on everybody, despite the cartoons and all that guff, the play starring Peter O’Toole. Bernard was a nasty, jealous misogynist who found a perfect safe house at the Colony: so many of its regulars were nasty that your average woman-hater struggled to stand out. (He was also a ponce who stole people’s returns from the betting ...”

“... lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife ...”

“... Day, tenacious as a badger; Ludovic Kennedy, whose line is artistic, faintly raffish melancholy; James Mossman, the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic ...”

“... In the National Theatre’s inaugural season in 1963 Michael Redgrave played Claudius to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet. Apart from Olivier, the theatre’s first director, Redgrave, then aged 55, was its greatest star. Known to the public from his many film roles, and having just been named actor of the year by the Evening Standard for his Uncle Vanya at Chichester, which one critic called ‘the highest level of acting the contemporary theatre has to offer’, he was good box-office ...”

“... soul-stripping illness whose details Bayley did not spare. After her death in 1999 things sped up. Peter Conradi’s portly authorised biography was smartly challenged by A.N. Wilson’s slimmer unauthorised memoir, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a witty, affectionate, impious account which made disturbing suggestions about Bayley’s feelings towards his ...”

“... the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly ...”

“... and Sure Hope – with brandishing the torch of faith against the established church.Hopes that James I, who succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, would cut puritans some slack were dashed by the instituting of new church canons. Some protested and were suspended; most capitulated. A brave few took a stand. In 1612 Edward Wightman, who dismissed the Trinity as a ...”

“... for short – within walking distance of Notting Hill. In the 1950s, the area was the domain of Peter Rachman, the Polish-born refugee turned slum landlord who exploited the hostility of the housing market towards Black immigrants, buying up run-down houses in Paddington and North Kensington and renting them to desperate people at extortionate ...”

“... of licensing laws to become the city’s first all-night superclub. One of its founders, James Palumbo (the son of Conservative peer Peter Palumbo), occasionally lent his chauffeur-driven car to Peter Mandelson. He even pitched, unsuccessfully, that Ministry be adopted as the ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”