“... gone to heaven? Is he playing a game on his PC?On the voice-over to the first Fellowship trailer, Peter Jackson, who directed the movie, portends: ‘The technology has caught up with the incredible imagination that Tolkien injected into that story of his. And so, this is the time.’ Of the many strange things there are to observe about Tolkien, the way his ...”

“... frightening pallor and unfathomable occupation, to be exactly real. He was Mr McGregor from the Peter Rabbit tales, or one of those old men in Edward Ardizzone books who shake their skinny fists at naughty children and weakly yell ‘Confound you!’ A world in which adults didn’t much credit the reality of children could work the other way round, too.At ...”

“... of Africa or opposed the Suez invasion in a famous editorial that described Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul Jennings that had a tongue-twister about ‘tuskless rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays ...”

“... both intellectually and organisationally, and they constituted a source of rivalrous curiosity in France, especially after the defeat of 1871, but they had considerable impact in Britain, too, not least in standing for an ideal of wissenschaftlich ‘research’ which came to be grafted onto the native traditions of teaching and scholarship. In the first ...”

“... and Freddo were moved to Cadbury’s Bournville plant and Fry’s Chocolate Cream went to Blois in France. In June, the Crunchie bar line and Fry’s Turkish Delight were moved to Poland, followed in September by Curly Wurly, and in December by Chomp, Fudge, Picnic and Double Decker. ‘We watched the last few Double Deckers go through,’ said ...”

“... and speak English, but the lingua franca is still Juba Arabic, a somewhat impoverished dialect. Peter, my boda-boda (motorcycle-taxi) driver, is Ugandan; for although the major businesses here all belong to government ministers and governors, or to their children, the gilded youth of Juba who returned from abroad after the peace agreements, almost all ...”

“... of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist awakening’ in the last two decades of the 19th century, when the Admiralty’s dogma that ‘the best guarantee for the peace of the world is a supreme British fleet’ became the leading edge of Imperial ...”

“... second time I saw him must have been a few years later at the Mermaid Theatre at a performance of Peter Luke’s play Hadrian VII with Alec McCowen. Then it was his characteristic walk that I noticed: he tripped down the aisle after the designer, Gladys Calthrop, his hands, fingers pressed together, half slipped into his trouser pockets ...”

“... would have been happy with that if it were the Netherlands, Denmark, Scandinavia, perhaps France,’ he said, with sudden intensity of feeling. ‘I thought that was what it was all about. All these Eastern European countries … to try and say “That’s us” is very difficult.’ A patina​ of ancient power, the kind of power that comes with ...”

“... whose works have survived: historians like Julius Caesar, who chronicled his own conquest of France in a deceptively simple style that long ago endeared him to teachers of Level-1 Latin; or Caesar’s Level-2 protégé Sallust, whose endless variety of old-fashioned nouns to describe contemporary vices quickly exhausts even the most fastidious ...”

“... haven’t read her biography); not to mention Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, Peter Brazeau’s disciplined and rather stylish oral biography from 1983.It is Brazeau who supplies a fascinating list of Stevens’s annual earnings; who has the more picturesque quotations (about a place in the Old South where you could get ‘oyster stew from ...”

“... colonial rebellion, which coincided with a severe economic depression. Ongoing tensions with France, as well as the absence of effective control over Indian and Irish affairs, contributed to a sense of general crisis. MPs demanded better government; William Pitt’s premiership after 1783 depended not just on providing it but on being seen to do ...”

“... of whom owed their visibility and commercial platform directly to the revolutionary upheavals.France’s new exhibiting artists hadn’t learned to paint in a fortnight. Most of the sixty works they showed in 1791 must have been complete, or almost complete, before the National Assembly’s decree, and to produce them they must have undergone formal ...”

“... picture; in some ways it reinforces it. Thompson’s second target is more consequential. It was Peter Laslett, adopting the techniques of the French historical demographers to the records of obscure English villages of the 17th century, who in 1963 first established what seemed to be the surprising modernity of English village life, at least with respect to ...”

“... concerning them manage to be as much about Schoenberg as anything else. Robert Simpson and Peter Maxwell Davies are given such occluded treatment that one might be forgiven for not recognising them at all. But it is the holes that I deplore. Bach is a pious shadow rather than a solid substance; the rest of the Baroque is altogether absent. So are whole ...”