“... of the work of the economist who wrote BIS’s ‘Supporting Analysis for the Higher Education White Paper’). Back in 1963, one of the most interesting and, in its way, radical proposals of the Robbins Report was that a new ministry should be created to give universities more direct representation within government. Arguing against the then fashionable ...”

“... or ‘pragmatic’ criticism. This latest move runs directly counter to the way that Peter de Bolla’s book Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics wants to take Bloom’s work. De Bolla’s clear, thoughtful description of Bloom’s career thus far is followed by a rigorous development of Bloom’s diachronic theory of tropes into a ...”

“... and unusual value. How many of us, for instance, have heard of August Stramm or Hermann Löns, Peter Baum or Walter Flex? But they are, or were, as notorious in their homeland as Rupert Brooke in our own; and when Tim Cross introduces us to their lives and works – the latter usually having the pathos of schoolboy essays or prize poems – they become as ...”

“... organisation, possibly founded by Churchill during World War Two? What did Deza’s mentor, Sir Peter Wheeler (modelled on the Oxford professor Sir Peter Russell), do during the Spanish Civil War? And what about the bloodstain on his stairs? What is being set up by the narrator’s constant outing of ‘bogus ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the streets. He reads a text from his Bible and says this: ‘That’s the kind of passage that white Southern fundamentalists, the ones who made out segregation was God’s law and that it was right to kill your enemies, loved to quote.’ Any actor asked to speak such a humpbacked sentence would either rephrase it himself or call for a writer. But such is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that rural nostalgia has been the fuel of British economic decline. One of the many merits of Peter Mandler’s superb study is that it utterly demolishes these assumptions. He shows that, by Continental standards, Britain has been exceptionally slow to protect its country houses. Political intervention has been resisted and commercial development put ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the film is, ultimately, pretence, his pretending makes the enjoyment real. At the end of The White Bus (1967), the heroine walks away from the other passengers, who have turned into mannequins, as if she has dissociated herself from their artificial existence. It’s not so much that they have turned into mannequins, as that they always were and she no ...”

“... toasted ‘trial by British jury’. Whether Pitt’s Government sought to initiate a reign of ‘white terror’, as E.P. Thompson suggested, remains a matter of speculation. In his third section, ‘Alarms and Diversions’, Barrell produces two fine chapters on the ‘popgun’ plot and the strange case of Richard Brothers. Just before Hardy’s trial ...”

“... Usmanov, it has two helipads. It also has a room where snow machines produce four inches of the white stuff on demand. It’s not clear what you’re supposed to do with such a room. (Bin Salman is reported to have kept Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi on the yacht while he was deciding what to do with it.)Dilbar is among dozens of multimillion-pound ...”

“... of debt, direct or indirect, to other writers. For example, he was a lifelong admirer of E.B. White and his correspondence indefatigably quotes White’s colourful definition of a miracle: ‘blue snow on a red barn’. In Lolita, Humbert speaks of ‘our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow’. Of ...”

“... the closing years of the Smith-run settler dictatorship. Worsthorne was hanging out with real white trash like P.K. Van der Byl, Smith’s kinkily sadistic deputy, and Richard Cecil, the brave but dim-bulbed scion of the Salisburys. We met in Meikles bar and had a very frank chat, in the course of which Worsthorne said that while he could easily look ...”

“... in the gym, under the avid gaze of their trainers, including Carmen Graziano, a portly, voluble white man in his late fifties who hangs over the ropes shouting instructions at the sparring fighters. Graziano could be seen in July in The Truth’s corner for the fight against Tyson in the Atlantic City Convention Centre. For Graziano, the event was a ...”