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“... Perhaps it is unEnglish of me to find all this unfunny. After Williams’s poison-brew, Peter Benson goes down like dry white wine. Yet The Other Occupant is a lesser book than the novel he published last year, A Lesser Dependency, both in the sense of being less ambitious and less well-written. A Lesser ...”

“... the Russians, one has to turn to the authoritative and attractively-written book of that title by Peter McCarey. Like Bold, Buthlay attends to links between the linguistic adventurousness of Joyce and that of MacDiarmid: but where Bold relates MacDiarmid’s advocacy of the Caledonian antisyzygy to a generally post-Hegelian consciousness, Buthlay indicates ...”

“... the name. The novel was finished in 1969 and was published in America in 1974, translated by Peter Kussi, who has now revised his translation. The provisional title referred to the lifespan of Jaromil, who dies young, as lyric poets will, but also to the enforced, mass-produced, writer-proclaimed revolutionary ardours which ensued in 1948. At the ...”

“... there, or discussed his feelings. Orton concludes: ‘the sleeve of my rainmac is covered with white-wash from the wall. It won’t come off.’ All emotion, all sensation, is edited out. But the scene is there – horribly vivid, carefully written. Because Orton’s prose is naturally flat and economical, the pose is perfunctory. Was Orton ...”

“... as ‘Lefty’), in which the silversmiths of Tula make a life-sized flea out of metal to show Peter the Great they are as skilled as their English counterparts. Whether Benjamin didn’t read the story, or had forgotten the details by the time he wrote about it, he mischaracterises it. They are gunsmiths, not silversmiths, and had the tsar been ...”

“... strands of the regime’s story. There have been several studies of this enigmatic man, but Peter Longerich’s massive biography, grounded in exhaustive study of the primary sources, is now the standard work and must stand alongside Ian Kershaw’s Hitler, Ulrich Herbert’s Best and Robert Gerwarth’s Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich as one ...”

“... Melbourne tram downtown, stopping only to glance in a bookseller’s window. It was good to see Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore holding its place in the bestseller list. 1 A good cop yarn set in Victoria, stylistically it is West Coast American, and has been received well there. But that’s not why it’s so popular here. The book sets out to ...”

“... have had a lurid hold on the popular imagination for at least two millennia. The idea that St Peter was crucified upside down was no sooner taken as a sign of his self-proclaimed unworthiness to share the fate of Jesus, than it was reinterpreted as a mark of his common sense. Even a poor fisherman knew that hanging head down brought the oblivion of ...”

“... theory and towards the frontiers being opened up by drugs and neurotransmitters. In 1959 Peter Tripp, a radio DJ in New York, decided to stay awake for two hundred hours to raise money for charity. Tripp set himself up in a glass booth in Times Square, monitored by sleep researchers, where he rapped and span records for two days and nights before his ...”

“... arrived early. Aged six, she gouged out Tinker Bell’s eyes in an illustrated edition of Peter Pan (‘My first act of proto-feminist critique in the realm of the visual’). Referring to it as a ‘desecration’, Nochlin said: ‘I hoped it hurt, and I was both frightened and triumphant looking at the black holes in the expensive paper. I hated ...”

“... in a sea battle off Flamborough Head in Yorkshire and that it still lay somewhere near the white chalk cliffs. In recent decades, both the US and French navies have tried to locate it, but there are hundreds of wrecks off that craggy coast and they failed to find anything that could be definitively identified. Then, in 2018, a company called Merlin ...”

“... his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost circle of the school’. However, as Peter Campbell wrote in the LRB (3 February 2011), English painters ‘responded to Impressionism’s escape from the academic into the everyday, but made something tighter and darker of it. The French pleasure in picnics and river parties and weather wasn’t ...”

“... party, is a dwarf, a worldly, jaded, funny, highly intelligent cynic and, as incarnated by Peter Dinklage, the indisputable star turn of the HBO series. The king and his entourage take up residence at Winterfell, ancestral home of the Starks. We see much of their antics from the perspective of Bran Stark, second-youngest son of Eddard, a ...”

“... sunny clearings in the midst of impenetrable gloom. Before his humble ghost alerts the men in white coats, however, perhaps I should move on. One of Wilamowitz’s criticisms was that Burckhardt was at least fifty years out of date, and fifty years later Arnaldo Momigliano was still blaming him for breathing new life into the already elderly notion of ...”

“... of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an ...”