“... usually explain the set-up early and clearly. The game can’t start until you know the rules. Peter Carter, falling to earth in his burning plane, accepts his designated death, but falls in love with the radio operator June and thereby somehow falls past it. The rest of A Matter of Life and Death follows from this anomalous case of physical (rather than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to collaborate was impressive, especially in the case of the ‘Dream Team’ of Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl. On the other hand, to be in the running one had to be a designated über-architect, presumably with the technical expertise required of grands projets: stock in the Dream Team, Lord Foster and the Skidmore Owings ...”

“... exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls’. Before reading out the statement on the doorstep of the Commission’s office in Salisbury Square, he again asked Fellowes whether Diana’s hands were clean, and was assured that they were. But soon after making his statement, McGregor was told by a News International ...”

“... hope to that saving possibility and not hold out against the occupying forces. His biographer, Peter Dodge, traces all the tortuous visions and revisions that led up to this ultimate misjudgment. He sees Hendrik de Man as a tragic figure, forced into exile (and convicted of treason in his absence), not so much through opportunism, compromise or worse, as ...”

“... him scope for the kind of ‘heroism’ he had craved for himself ever since his adolescent reading of Greek and medieval epics: knightly charging (if on camels rather than horses), gorgeously costumed, impervious to danger. Crucially for his ‘solution’, he also liked the Arabs’ social arrangements – hereditary leaders who needed to prove their ...”

“... a band on the road. It became routine for him to have seizures on stage. Joy Division’s bassist, Peter Hook, thinks that ‘the problem with Ian’s illness was that we were all young enough to ignore it.’ His fans, also young, also ignored it. He started to dance on stage like someone who didn’t want to but had to. I remember his slack face and the way ...”

“... Das Kapital (‘Capital is the great drama of our age’), with the main arena playing host to a reading of the entire work. Marx is artist #047 in the catalogue. The performance, organised by the installation artist Isaac Julien, is preceded by a video interview with David Harvey for those who missed ‘Reading Marx’s ...”

“... signalled a betrayal of authentic conservatism, invoked Burke as a counterweight to Thatcher’s reading – or misreading – of Friedrich von Hayek. Thatcher’s philosophical hero was, by a further irony, himself an admirer of Burke; indeed the classically liberal Hayek was, like Burke, no Tory, and a postscript to his Constitution of Liberty (1960) is ...”

“... combination of highly-charged relationships, events, situations and developments: the husband reading his wife’s chillingly hostile journal entry about himself; the friends whose marriages break up out of the blue; the artist of ‘happenings’ whose projects involve constructing fictions around real people whose lives she has researched; the ...”

“... any comparison with William Burroughs and Junkie. We are told by MacCabe that Healy’s reading habits favoured trash-factory crime fiction. Therefore, it is presumed, he dropped naturally into ‘the hard-boiled cadences of a Hammet [sic] detective novel’. It is regrettable that MacCabe (or his editors) should have such a slender acquaintance ...”

“... whiff of the fervent. The initiation is, after all, a formidable one. There is a huge programme of reading to do before you will be taken seriously by the cognoscente, and you will not find any short cuts through the thickets of the Library Edition (39 volumes, all magnificently edited, none slender). Add to that all the secondary ...”

“... a Tory MP, and died a hero on the battlefield in May 1917. Val had two sons, the elder of whom, Peter, b. 1907, inherited the tendency to be a paragon, and the younger of whom, Ian, b. 1908, inevitably became the family handful. Things were not helped by the wills of Val and Robert, which absent-mindedly or maliciously left the boys’ mother, Eve, with not ...”