“... anyway much like it here. No, let him live. But still, what do you do if you’re a bachelor, or James Goldsmith, or a lesbian, or Welsh, or a good-looking nun, or Peter Parker, or a social worker, or a cat? You could always (well, not the cat) try taking Waugh to court. But who would want to stand up in the Old Bailey and ...”

“... they are capital fun. And fun is very important to Chesterton, who would heartily have endorsed James Joyce’s in risu Veritas. ‘The stars are funny,’ we learn from an essay in All Things Considered, ‘because they give birth to life, and life gives birth to fun.’ If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only prove it by talking ...”

“... writers in this area whose achievement Dr Küng feels free to overlook: Robert M. Adams, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, Terence Penelhum, Alvin Plantinga, James Ross and Richard Swinburne, for example, have all made contributions far too substantial to be thus ignored. Dr Küng’s enormous apparatus of bibliography ...”

“... of fiction that are outstandingly successful from a commercial point of view – Ken Follett and James Herbert, perhaps – or the most saccharine romance. Instead, it awards its prize to ‘the best novel in the opinion of the judges, published each year’. ‘Best’ is interpreted as ‘most distinguished literary performance’. The ulterior ...”

“... June Allyson as Jo, Janet Leigh as Meg, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Peter Lawford played a glamorous Laurie – indeed, the screenplay describes Laurie as looking ‘not unlike our idea of Edgar Allan Poe’. Armstrong’s Little Women is the most British and Pickwickian of the movie versions, set in a vague 19th-century ...”

“... already? Nothing on Carling was offered, or asked for by the fawning Bashir, and nothing on young James Gilbey of the ‘Squidgy’ tapes either. And she got a free pass on the manic telephone calls. I always wanted to know if it was true – as her male relatives went on telly to claim at the time – that she was a virgin when she got married. Nada on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to do with the bombings. My attention​ was first drawn to the Birmingham case by my friend Peter Chippendale, who covered the trial for the Guardian. He told me he thought the wrong people had been convicted. It was ten years or so before I began to investigate the matter. In the early 1980s I persuaded Carmen Callil at Chatto and Windus to commission ...”

“... have lost the battle but we will win the war.’ Two messages from the SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell (who is married to Sturgeon), sent the day after Salmond was first charged, were leaked to the Westminster MP and former Holyrood justice secretary Kenny MacAskill, one of Salmond’s allies. In the first, Murrell appeared to call for pressure to be ...”

“... he has a white-bearded hawk of a face, with the clear eyes of a fighter pilot. He made me think of James Salter and his code of taciturn manliness.But then you meet another witness who explains the big gap between ordering the death of your enemy from 15,000 feet and being in the dark in a Viet Cong tunnel. This is ...”