“... hall isn’t surprising. In another sense, it is as astounding as it would be to learn that Sir Peter Tapsell began his career as a plumber’s mate. ‘Whatever gifts my parents passed on to their children,’ Major remarks in My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall, ‘the talent to entertain was not among them,’ which must be one of the ...”

“... Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain invisible. And many of Maschler’s authors weren’t household names in Britain until he published them at Jonathan ...”

“... political views for granted, however. He could be equally difficult with Stalinists. And when Peter Hain’s group, Stop the Seventy Tour, led local anti-apartheid activists to dig up the cricket pitch in the Oxford Parks so as to sabotage the university match against the Springboks, Hodgkin was asked over and over again to sign a petition to get the ...”

“... from her work; today her poems are rather criticised than praised for having about them what Peter Trinder called in his 1984 biography ‘a domestic tidiness’. The poet of home and hearth, of family values and traditional roles, was a single mother. Captain Arthur Hemans had walked out of the family home in 1818, when his wife was pregnant with their ...”

“... out to be true.’‘Bieberbach was a tremendous achievement, there’s no question about it,’ Peter Sarnak of the Institute for Advanced Studies says. ‘Louis de Branges hit the big time there, really. It was a great problem . . . and his solution was absolutely brilliant, really brilliant.’ But Sarnak is one of many who dismiss his Riemann Hypothesis ...”

“... John Wolfenden, former headmaster of Uppingham and Shrewsbury, and Vice-Chancellor of Reading University from 1950 to 1963) he seemed destined, towards the world of international journalism. The first was Neal Ascherson, two years ahead of him at Eton, a formidable intelligence, who went to Cambridge and subsequently became a distinguished ...”

“... and crystals, beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Odysseus’ behaviour the night before he slaughters his wife Penelope’s suitors, which Peter Green translates like this: As a man cooking a paunch chockful of fat and blood on a fierce blazing fire will turn it to and fro, determined to get it cooked through as fast as he can, so Odysseus tossed this way and that, trying to work out how he was ...”

“... could be found on wet lunchtimes in the Lit and Phil, where reporters were allowed to use the reading room. Basil’s father read Wordsworth to his son and took the boy climbing in the Lake District. The family was deeply involved in the musical culture of Newcastle and Basil was a trained chorister who considered a professional career in music. This ...”

“... Before I went to Westminster I lived entirely in books and the past. I looked forward to reading Virgil and Pope and finding someone to talk to about Medieval coins, which I collected avidly. That is what I meant by saying that I was a prig. The interests of the boys I found myself among seemed confined to games, bullying and sex. I was, quite ...”

“... between a mature applicant and his MI5 selection board in 1981. ‘Have you any objection to reading other people’s mail?’ he was asked – suggesting that the old prejudice was still alive in some quarters. ‘What did the Board think I had been doing for the past 20 odd years!’ the applicant wondered. Those 20-odd years had been spent in the ...”

“... uncannily like one of those advent-calendar mobiles they used to make out of coat-hangers on Blue Peter. That’s how it goes with structures of occult significance. Phenomena which seem loaded with brooding horror by evening have a funny way of looking limp, harmless and rather foolish by the rising light of day. In one section of the novel – Book II to be ...”

“... as yet of Aristotle and Plato (as indeed of Mahomet) is no doubt purely temporary. But, on any reading of the concept of authority, it is a little surprising to find Godwin and Herzen figuring in the initial list of Masters. Here perhaps the editor’s well-founded appreciation of his authors mildly distorts the balance of his judgment of what such a ...”

“... slow history of how the European aristocracy finally learned to behave in an aristocratic way. Peter Burke treats The Book of the Courtier as an ‘open text’, whose dialogue form and apparent tensions and contradictions may reflect its author’s refusal to offer a simple moral, as well as the long time that he spent at work on it and the changes in his ...”