“... seldom in French or Italian. An opening chapter on ‘Tacitism, scepticism and reason of state’ (Peter Burke) takes us from a Humanist starting point through a scepticism that called for a rethinking of natural law and an awareness of ragione di stato which only a jus gentium could alleviate. In the next two chapters – ‘Grotius and Selden’ (Richard ...”

“... have struggled to turn a profit; many have ended up at one point or another in unscrupulous hands. Peter Cook’s venture, the Establishment, was taken over by gangsters in 1963; in 1972 John Aspinall sold the Clermont to Playboy as its main London casino. In 1976, George Marks, a jovial Canadian-American property developer with a silver Rolls-Royce, offered ...”

“... right enemies (and not find himself finessed so that he’s lined up with Sewell – or the late Peter Fuller) and stay out on the left flank; his fury is rather Victorian – Ruskin’s rage against the immoralism of the Baroque. Oddly enough, Matthew Collings – in the book of his Channel Four series – says many of the same things as Stallabrass; he ...”

“... of economics (thanks not just to Keynes’s early polemic but also to such historians as Peter Krüger, Gerald Feldman, Harold James and Niall Ferguson). The core of Mayer’s message was that the Russian Revolution was central to decision-making at Paris; that when the slogan bisogna fare come en Rusia was adopted ...”

“... and he was satisfied’ is how she describes a man with a prostitute. But readers admired the King James cadences: this was what great literature was supposed to sound like. Spurling, like some of Buck’s other biographers, charitably suggests that she first thought through her books in Chinese, translating as she went along; what sounds biblical is actually ...”

“... group and, after Rockingham’s death, its successor the Foxites – followers of Charles James Fox – who, with some success, tried to monopolise the Whig label. Their main opponents, the Pittites, who followed William Pitt the Younger, are often miscategorised as Tories, though they too described themselves as Whigs. The modern Conservative Party ...”

“... of Shadows, though very readable and clear in detail, lacks the overall narrative clarity of Peter Hopkirk’s studies of the subject, most notably The Great Game (1990). The essential truth about Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia is that, despite the imperialist fantasies entertained by some of the Game’s players, there was never all that much at ...”

“... our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a ...”

“... might occasionally sport his Nemean trophy in the theatre, but it is difficult to believe that Peter Quince and his assemblage of very amateur actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream plausibly procured the real thing for Snug the joiner in the part of Lion. Bears were more plentiful in plays, especially for a few years after 1609 when, as we now know thanks ...”

“... the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end ...”

“... an arch with a kink at one end like a giant dog ball thrower, is, according to its designer Peter Jenkins, the first of its kind in the world. ‘I’d like to think that George Stephenson would have approached the challenge in a similar manner, laying the new railway infrastructure over the old,’ he told the Manchester Evening News. Even the Chinese ...”

“... time I was working on an anthology of gay and lesbian fiction for Faber and had chosen a story by Peter Hazeldine, whose novel Raptures of the Deep was a Brilliance venture. One day Jeanette showed me something she had written, a few handwritten sides of what seemed to be prose poetry. Would it do for the book? I didn’t think so. I told her it seemed like a ...”

“... which ‘conjures up the now familiar and haunting spectre of urban alienation’. Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar is a ‘particularly depressing place to live in’, with an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’, mainly an ‘example of the late modernist avant-garde determination to realise a theoretical position at ...”

“... we hear of Watkins until Parrot meets him again in New York, where he is busily impersonating John James Audubon, obsessively absorbed in his life’s project: the greatest book of bird engravings the world has ever seen – Birds of America. Watkins is horribly disfigured, ancient looking: ‘His pale blue eyes peered out from his own tattered skin as if they ...”

“... his act may look dull and formulaic: he simply got uppity with a luckless straight man called Peter Brough and showered him with childish insults. But he was able to bring on a troop of co-stars – Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie ...”