“... I’d written about another recent film, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged (an adaptation of James Lasdun’s story ‘The Siege’), which was somehow rated PG. Much of the time I spent with my parents was in foyers and auditoriums across London, and on the journeys there and back. My mother was the more regular companion, my father the more ...”

“... out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever ...”

“... gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...”

“... action is harder to fathom, especially in the more autonomous societies of the British Atlantic. James Walvin’s new book takes a different approach. In an effort to get away from the ‘big meta-narrative’, Walvin presents biographical sketches of three participants in Britain’s 18th-century slave economy. John Newton (1725-1807) was a slave captain ...”

“... islet is crammed with men: Chief Vorstenbosch, Deputy Melchior van Cleef, Dr Marinus, Senior Clerk Peter Fischer, Junior Clerk Ponke Ouwehand, Arie Grote, Piet Baert, Ivo Oost, Wybo Gerritszoon. Their conversation is as cacophonous as their names. For instance: ‘most of us hands gather of an evenin’ in my humble billet, eh, for a little hazard ...”

“... loose with the dates and the references, claiming for example to have conducted an interview with Peter Lawford, the English actor and member of the rat pack, on a date some time after his death. Kelley is not just mean, or dangerous: she has a very powerful understanding of what makes a modern celebrity. She gets the journey, to use a favourite Oprah ...”

“... within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers aren’t just papers any ...”

“... field.Only eight years before, the high master of the fee-paying Manchester Grammar School, Eric James, had argued against greater social mobility as an educational objective, writing in the Guardian that ‘we must recognise with greater frankness the facts of human inequality.’ True, he admitted, children at academically selective (as well as ...”

“... sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1797). The Compleat Drawing-Book is an example of the kind of educational artistic guide that flourished in the 18th century. The ...”

“... Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is preparing to forsake fiction for a while and embark upon an autobiographical narrative, an endeavour which he approaches warily, uncertain as to both its ...”

“... only learned of this fifteen years later. The hunt for the fifth persists. It was the tortured James Angleton – erstwhile head of CIA counter-intelligence, who had learnt part of his trade from Philby – who bitterly and despairingly credited the KGB with creating ‘a wilderness of mirrors’. Maybe, Angleton took too literally the extravagances of ...”

“... we should express no opinion on this issue, and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasise this instruction. Even as the latest in ‘smart’ technology grinds and punctures the Iraqi military, this amazingly explicit enticement to Saddam is still being debated. Did the United States intend ...”

“... was conversion to Protestantism, a step taken by (among others) an uncle of William’s, Peter Warren. Warren would ultimately become admiral of the fleet and famous as a British naval hero; he would also serve as a model, and patron, for his nephew. By marrying into a leading family of Dutch New Yorkers, the Delanceys, Warren acquired a direct stake ...”

“... In any case, Reid made his disagreements with Hutcheson explicit in his lectures at Glasgow: see Peter Kivy’s edition of Thomas Reid’s Lectures on the Fine Arts (1973). The conclusion is inescapable: either Jefferson changed his mind or he never noticed the problem. There is no evidence that he changed his mind, and it turns out that what Wills has ...”

“... read. To this day, many Glaswegians would agree.In 2022 a London-based urban designer called Peter Kelly set up a campaign group called Replace the M8. Kelly believes there is a nostalgia for ‘the completeness of the 19th-century city’. What does he want? Tunnels, he says, though he is aware that some cultural revolutionaries want anything resembling ...”