“... refused to join in the struggle and struck up a conversation with another soldier who was calmly reading a book. He found he was talking to a fellow-Parisian. Guy-Bernard Delapierre, an Egyptologist. The two were shortly separated, but he was later handed a note from Delapierre giving him Delapierre’s address in Paris, and they were to become close friends ...”

“... all began to take on some credence once more. The last, especially, though a marginal theme of Peter Wright’s book (he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about: Wilson was obviously a rotter), rocked people’s trust in MI5. That could be taken to justify the secret services’ strategy all along. Any publicity would inspire paranoia, which they ...”

“... arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something wonderful’. After she ...”

“... poet’s conversion. Dante, however, invents the tale that Statius became a Christian after reading Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, a ‘messianic’ poem from around 42 BCE interpreted by St Augustine as a prophecy of Jesus. So, like a man carrying a light behind his back, Virgil saves others though he himself is damned. Statius confesses that he kept his ...”

“... dressed in a sober grey suit and waistcoat’. He would order a Gibson cocktail and sit at the bar reading the morning papers. Around 11, he would usually be joined – according to Aburish – by Bill Eveland, who worked undercover for the CIA in the Middle East for a number of years. Around noon, John Mecklin of Time magazine would appear, soon to be ...”

“... Paul Foot, now its politics are rightish, its stance prurient, and its key figures Nigel Dempster, Peter McKay and Auberon Waugh. The radical lampoon has become required reading on the magazine syllabus of every Sloane Ranger. Moreover, the Eye, that fearless exposer of the faintest mafia, now runs a comfortable little ...”

“... the annotation is purely textual, and explanatory only when the editors need to justify a reading; so anybody who craves the sort of help to be had from, say, the Arden Shakespeare, or the single-play editions of the Oxford, or even from some rival collected editions, will need an even larger desk. And we learn from the Preface, with mixed ...”

“... again that don’t apply But I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.One of the side effects of reading through this edition’s extraordinarily wide-ranging and inclusive notes is the periodical rising of a Sweeney-like urge to declare: ‘That don’t apply.’ Like Sweeney, every poem has got to use words, and those words will also necessarily have been ...”

“... rock group Coil, now sadly no more since the deaths of its two founding members, Geoff Rushton and Peter Christopherson, whom I knew, though not especially well. When I interviewed Rushton (a.k.a. John Balance) in 2000, one of the things that came up was his deep, abiding love for Kate Bush. Actually, it was more like he saw her as some form of household deity ...”

“... of A.F. Pollard, and so on to John Neale, his pupils and colleagues, and beyond to Peter Lake and John Guy. So often studies of Elizabeth’s reign are impossible to disentangle from the moment when they were written, whether from Victorian and Edwardian confidence in robust parliamentary government, or from post-imperial decline, or the ...”

“... In the story Martins thinks ‘he’s never grown up,’ and then realises that ‘evil was like Peter Pan – it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.’ When this line appears in the movie, without the Peter Pan association, it seems merely sententious, largely because it compares so badly ...”

“... 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 Dependency set out both to document and to ...”

“... in London, they were asked if they played chess, did crosswords or knew foreign languages. Those reading Classics were asked if they would like to learn Japanese. There were also experts in modern languages (two were known as ‘the walking dictionaries’) and, by 1943, many mathematicians (six of whom were, or were to become, fellows of the Royal ...”

“... with a rather endearing forelock’ and Halliwell’s difficult personality improved. One person, Peter Willes, then head of drama at Rediffusion, is prepared to say of Orton that ‘he did not have a heart’ – only to continue, ‘but I loved what was there instead, which was infinite kindness and good manners.’ And the diaries record several ...”

“... a hit-or-miss physician; Sir Bonus MacScrip, venal member for the borough of Threevotes; Peter Paypaul Paperstamp, the sinecure-seeking poet of Mainchance Villa; Sir Simon Steeltrap, scourge of poachers on his hunting estate at Spring-gun and Treadmill. Some of the names indicate real-life targets such as George Canning, the Tory statesman who ...”