“... darling little bloke, always laughing, tumbling, doing his tricks’. The séances make cloying reading, deliberately so: this is the public, sanitised version of life ‘beyond black’. Alison’s performances, in village halls and frowsy civic buildings, are enervatingly banal: ‘Oh you’re so lovely . . . Such a lovely, warm and understanding ...”

“... what Rainey, in one of his strategically chilling phrases, terms ‘discursive hegemony’. Their reading of the poem was not the ‘close reading’ since practised by generations of scholars and students, but a ‘not-reading’: a grasp of its meaning and value as a commodity in the ...”

“... In his own time, Shakespeare was much better known to the reading public as a poet than as a playwright. Venus and Adonis went through ten editions before his death in 1616, and another six before 1640. His other long narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, was less popular, but it, too, circulated far more widely than any of the plays, appearing in six editions during his life, and in two more by 1640 ...”

“... shell-hole, where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus. He wrote home on 13 September 1916 that ‘the stench from the dead bodies which lie in heaps around is awful.’ Only a fortnight earlier he had told his mother: ‘do not worry about me. I am very happy; it is a great ...”

“... likeable and interesting, as indeed they mostly were. At the top, virtually in the roof, there was Peter Cadogan, left-wing humanist and champion of lost causes; a typographer, a batique artist and a dress designer, inter alia, occupied the middle floors; and in the basement there lived the late and much lamented Barry Carman, Australian-born author and writer ...”

“... the largest and most influential professional organisation of its type in the world. A closer reading of the Time article shows that it is not so much psychiatry – ‘psychological medicine’, as it is often called in this country – as psychoanalysis, ‘Freud’s Wunderkind’, whose claims are being questioned. In his study of Freud and the ...”

“... and Ronald Reagan. The present volume, in other words, would make soothing bedside reading for Mrs Margaret Thatcher, not least because its opening contribution comes from her favourite TV star and economist, Milton Friedman, the man for whom the British economy is now what St Paul’s was to Sir Christopher Wren: Si monumentum ...”

“... he was a Job Centre counsellor and a pub bore. The man has embraced infamy like a bride. At least Peter Sutcliffe kept his mouth shut. After his arrest, Nilsen never stopped talking: letters to the Guardian, pages and pages on his state of mind for the police. Indeed, in retrospect, it is this aspect of Nilsen – his unrelenting fascination with words ...”

“... it made Self momentarily speechless. ‘Belly of an architect,’ he said, using the title of the Peter Greenaway movie to express his amazement. ‘A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the Western eye,’ Joan Didion said. She was writing about California, where pools, in her view, were less a symbol of ...”

“... and his sense of persecution; social media provide narcissists with limitless resources for reading about themselves, something Pietersen does incessantly. He also scours the press for anything that might indicate that his side of the story is being neglected. He even has the narcissist’s habit of referring to himself in the third person. When he ...”

“... for Human Rights used individual cases to argue for abolition, sensationalised cases like that of Peter Kürten (the model for Fritz Lang’s M) worked in the opposite direction, isolating the ‘sentimentalists’ and leading to what one liberal paper conceded was ‘an outcry in favour of capital punishment’. In this sphere, as in others, the Nazis worked ...”

“... the informant and inspiration for a number of other writers, notably the American anthropologists Peter Furst and Barbara Myerhoff. In view of all the anthropological work on the Huichol, Lewis’s account of them is oddly nebulous. He was unable to join Ramon on the Peyote Hunt so we are not told what happens during this elaborate ritual, the locus of ...”

“... Telegraph, Norman Tebbit appears as a crazed, bloodthirsty infantryman, with Douglas Hurd and Peter Walker mounted behind him, apparently duetting the Iron Duke’s quip: ‘I don’t know what effect he will have upon the enemy, but, by God, he terrifies me.’ Garland’s cartoon is derivative and poorly executed (it has nothing to feast the eye), but ...”

“... those supercooled, Stygian tempi. By explaining the earlier development of Klemperer’s art, Peter Heyworth’s biography places the notorious aspects of its last phase in a proper perspective, and restores balance to a reputation which has become, in England at any rate, lopsided. It teaches us, for example, that Klemperer’s tempi were not always ...”

“... Tasmania’s prodigal son, Peter Conrad, suggested recently that his island-state had ‘unwritten its own history’ in accordance with ‘a self-protective incuriosity about origins’. Tasmania’s origins lay in an act of genocidal conquest and a penal experiment, both of which were so recent and so omnipresent in their effect as to make recollection intolerable ...”