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“... in Britain,’ Joyce crowed on air as the Phoney War became the invasion summer. During the ‘white hot weeks’ after Dunkirk, the British public grew increasingly susceptible to scares about German parachutists and Fifth Columnists. Ranks of enemy agents were said to be disguising themselves as nuns. As people became more jittery, Lord Haw-Haw’s ...”

“... work: they were too tight, too tired. Their broken English discouraged them from mingling with white communities which increasingly resented their cheerless, yapping ways. The austere work ethic continued long after they had paid for their families in India and Pakistan to join them. They prized money, not culture. Asian mothers would drag their kids ...”

“... yet historically grounded. The visit was greatly enhanced by his friend and travelling companion Peter Beuth, head of the Prussian Department of Trade. Beuth had visited Britain before and wrote to Schinkel from Manchester in 1823 that ‘only here ... the machinery and buildings can be found commensurate with the miracles of modern times – they are called ...”

“... triumphant. It describes how wealthy twin sisters from Ayrshire, blue-stockings who in fact wore white stockings, travelled to St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai and discovered an early version of the Gospels, which was being used, a page at a time, to serve pats of butter. Not every well-bred Scots lady can identify a greasy Syriac palimpsest at ...”

“... ostensibly outside its world. Selznick was uneasy about the story’s aptness to be read as a white parable of the essential goodness of the slave-owning South. The film tries its best to alleviate the tacit racism, banning the word ‘nigger’ and repressing direct mention of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the real world would draw out the story’s latent ...”

“... It may also have helped Ian Smith’s Rhodesia; though, again, Walton has no proof. MI5’s Dick White claimed that SIS had collected ‘evidence’ of homosexuality with which to blackmail Cyprus’s Archbishop Makarios, but the papers aren’t yet available to back this up (or otherwise). We know SIS was involved in the ousting of Mossadeq in Iran in ...”

“... Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home in the early 1580s of the French Ambassador to the Court of Elizabeth I, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, an establishment described by John Bossy as ‘zany, convivial and leak-ridden ...”

“... Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest work, but just at the point at which he began to win recognition, he appeared to give up writing. Though he continued to publish in little magazines throughout the ...”

“... morphine for pain, because he seemed so close to death. In New Problems in Medical Ethics (1956), Peter Flood, a Benedictine, stated that Christians in pain should accept suffering ‘as permitted by God for our betterment’. Pain was a ‘privilege, in union with the redemptive sufferings of Christ’. It was essential that a physician tell people they ...”

“... who kept body and soul together on a minute stipend by writing facetious novels under the name of Peter Priggins. The Brookes’ wine shop – always known as the Office – was at Folkestone. They themselves lived at Sandgate, a more socially eligible strip of coast to the west. They also possessed an inland cottage at Bishopsbourne in the Elham ...”

“... time as MacAskill and Ord started their work), The Life You Can Save (founded by the philosopher Peter Singer), Good Ventures (founded by the Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who have pledged to give away most of their money), Animal Charity Evaluators (an 80,000 Hours spin-off) and the Open Philanthropy Project (a collaboration ...”

“... was a slum at the beginning of the 1960s. It was London’s version of New York’s West Side, Peter Hall wrote in his book London 2000 (1963). ‘The first problem with London is to define it,’ Hall said, but he had no trouble defining Notting Hill. ‘These are the big Victorian houses in multi-occupation which represent London’s most unfortunate ...”

“... British state now doomed? No wars against Continental enemies are in prospect; even geography – white cliffs, island fortress – means a lot less than it did. In the absence of any unitary racial or religious self-definition, old loyalties and alignments – Scottishness, Welshness – have emerged from under the ragged counterpane of British ...”

“... of the well-born.’ Those epigrammatic generalisations, from the pens of Paul Veyne and Peter Brown, are fairly typical of the History of Private Life at its best: a book which makes the reader think, teasing and encouraging with spicy details, long views, a capacity for the unexpected insight. Now for something completely different: ‘The goose is ...”

“... sitting back and thinking about Porter’s Boeotia’,† an essay which takes off from Peter Porter’s poem ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’, and which seems to have followed on from their interchange at the 1975 Poetry Australia ‘Write-In’. Athens and Boeotia are seen as ‘two models of civilisation between which Western man ...”