“... the perspective of an adult, and to assume that Gorey did too. Yet, as his occasional collaborator Peter Neumeyer remarked: ‘Of all the people I’ve known nobody has been less interested in children.’ He had no memory of Gorey ever even using the word ‘child’.What Gorey understood was not children, but the perspective of childhood and its lack of ...”

“... and colleague of Edwin Chadwick, who found his match in the equally expansive (canon-wise) James Crossley – a more cautious and cunning operator, the extent of whose activities as a corpus-sweller has not been fully apparent until now. Furbank and Owens suggest that Chalmers was both accident-prone and obstinately credulous – witness his eager ...”

“... private friends, any private life. George Spater quotes from some notes made by Cobbett’s son, James, who was projecting a biography but found the task difficult, as well he might. In 1865, James wrote of his father: He had but little individual attachment. Liked people’s company; – they liked his (when he was ...”

“... deferred that we must act decisively now. Are these demands reasonable? They might be if – as James Hansen, one of the founders of climate science, has claimed – it is ‘our last chance to save humanity’. But is it? Any change in temperature will inevitably benefit some species and harm others, so it probably is the last chance to save those adapted ...”

“... to, Monty Johnstone’s is a name that recurs, along with the philosopher Hyman (Hymie) Levy, Peter Fryer the journalist, and Brian Pearce, well known today as a translator of historical works from French and Russian. Levy she remembers as a very persuasive public speaker, whose Edinburgh accent ‘made everything sound reasonable’. Her observation post ...”

“... of Russian power after 2000 that fuelled a series of ugly confrontations. In Who Lost Russia? Peter Conradi attempts a more balanced view, providing a brisk run-through of the post-Cold War era in which both Russia and the West are faulted for a string of misguided moves. A correspondent in Moscow from 1988 to 1995, and now foreign editor of the Sunday ...”

“... passes as white to marry well. What sets Larsen’s novels apart from other such narratives – James Weldon-Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), for example – is their resistance to moral didacticism. For one character, passing is merely a question of convenience: ‘restaurants, theatre tickets’. Larsen was born in Chicago in ...”

“... reminiscences over the teacups. The story that Mai Zetterling told of her encounter with Peter Sellers and Kingsley Amis, at the time of the filming of Only Two Can Play, moves easily enough from life to fiction. ‘Want to see my Aertexes?’ asks the disgraceful Rex Martin, the Amis offprint. What happens is that world fits within world like a ...”

“... of this journal cannot be unaware, there appeared last year a controversial volume edited by Peter Widdowson called Re-Reading English, which faithfully applied Williams’s critique of academic English, and equally faithfully reproduced many of the shortcomings of his manner, including its open political bias and its embarrassing shortage of ...”

“... and whimsicalities into the author of ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ and ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’.Stevens met Elsie Viola Moll (née Kachel) in June 1904, during a visit to his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania. He had been living in New York since 1900, and had discovered the hard way that ‘the world holds an unoccupied niche ...”

“... the table, and five years later the Mythe waterworks opened for business. When, in April, I asked Peter Gavan, Severn Trent’s director of external affairs, if I could visit the Mythe waterworks, he said I could not. The floods, he said by way of explanation, were history; the implication being that history was not a good thing for a business to have. During ...”

“... as the Cambridge School, inaugurated a contextualist revolution. The school’s founding father, Peter Laslett, pointed out the errors and anachronisms of political philosophers who paid no attention to the genesis of the texts they studied. Although Locke’s Two Treatises of Government wasn’t published until after the Glorious Revolution of ...”

“... Reading this Life of Lloyd George is like watching one of those old James Cagney movies where it’s established early on that the protagonist isn’t simply an anti-hero but, for all that he’s lionised, an irredeemable villain. The fun comes from watching him get away with all sorts of caddishness early on and then carry on the virtuoso act long after everyone has got his number ...”

“... paid for the upkeep of a marsupial in 1611? William Walker, keeper of fowl at the menagerie in St James’s Park, was paid five shillings a month to care for England’s first recorded opossum. What was the customs duty on an emu in 1801? Joseph Banks narrowly avoided customs duty ad valorem – duty based on market value – on three of them, which would ...”

“... surprising since the government hand-picked the panel members – led by the formidable Sir Peter Gross, a former lord justice of appeal – and drafted its terms of reference. The review received and analysed thousands of pages of evidence from legal experts, politicians, NGOs, the general public and the president of the European Court of Human ...”