“... into close relations with Hugh Gaitskell. It would be unkind as well as inaccurate to call him the Peter Mandelson of the Gaitskell years, not least because, unlike Mandelson, he had established constituency roots before he began and also because, unlike Mandelson, he had rather little impact on the actual presentation of the Party’s policies, which remained ...”

“... of a major new artist’, but the Observer sees nothing but ‘duff bravura and blank poise’. Peter Fuller, editor of Modern Painters, fears for the hyped Conroy. The Times Literary Supplement: a ‘sinister portent’. The Financial Times critic describes the paintings with care, but fetches up with ‘a scumbled emptiness’. The Tablet concedes ‘a ...”

“... in which simple images have replaced ideas and argument has been supplanted by razzmataz. On this reading, Margaret Thatcher must rank as the premier who has hastened the reduction of the democratic process to the level of show-business. The writers’ tone is journalistic, and not always far removed from that of some of those whom they deride. However, their ...”

“... Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill and Peter Temple-Morris deliver themselves of staggeringly banal pronouncements. In spite of some of them going on ‘fact-finding’ missions to the Middle East, they are as ill-informed and full of poor advice on their return as they were before. Even worse, when ...”

“... Seymour-Smith redeems himself for the awfulness of Novels and Novelists. He is a man of immense reading in several languages, and without aiming at critical profundity, a lively, vigorous and intelligent commentator on all that he has read. Fifty European Novels begins with Rabelais and ends with Pasternak. It includes discussion of novels in ...”

“... contemptuous of the project even after the filming had started. Michael Gill and his co-producer, Peter Montagnon, have painful memories of a luncheon they and their team were given when they did some filming at Saltwood. Jane announced loudly that the Queen Mother had lunched there the week before and left a handsome tip for the servants, so the price of ...”

“... and Spender and his then wife Inez, were Auden and Isherwood, their new boyfriends, and Peter Pears as co-host with Britten. The stickiness – clearly a source of great amusement to Coldstream and Spender – lay in the tensions between the lifestyles of the people concerned, and the frustration felt by Auden and Isherwood – naturally dominant ...”

“... in history to abide by his own teachings. Some 2500 years later, in 1975, the philosopher Peter Unger published a book called Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism, in which, at the stupendous length of 323 pages, he argued that no one knows anything, ever did, or could ever do so. How even more ironic, given the success of the scientific method, that the ...”

“... frightened men, their obsession with the surface of femininity, and their lack of women.’ After reading this essay and (for example) the essay on Pollock, it wasn’t clear to me why it mattered, in terms of Berger’s notions of painting, whether a painting is thought to cling to the surfaces of things or to offer those surfaces as intimations of the ...”

“... a hole, laid down some perforated cardboard over it, and ‘selected a favourite picture’. ‘Peter turned around. I got down on the ground, checked to see if he was looking, took my dick out of my trousers, and fucked the wet black hole.’ Around the same age I also bought copies of the Sun with my friends, as well as the Star and the People. It may ...”

“... and tribal’ in their campaign against AV seems to have surprised Clegg, although a quick reading of any history of the Conservative Party would have enlightened him. Furthermore, his primary and endlessly repeated defence of the coalition (that it has to clear up the terrible mess left behind by Labour), though not completely untrue, contains a large ...”

“... rare that someone is individually responsible for a collapse. My professor at architecture school, Peter Galdi, liked to talk about the Manhattan Bridge. It was then nearly a hundred years old; maintenance on the bridge had been deferred for decades; a thorough survey had been made of its soft spots. No one, Galdi told us, knew what was holding it ...”

“... is unable to grasp the reality of the conflict. According to the German literary historian Peter de Mendelssohn, My First Wife is ‘exactest, most scrupulous autobiography’, ‘authentic to the last detail’. But it’s hard to shake off the impression that Ganna-Speyer is Wassermann-Herzog’s creation: it isn’t just books and class that have ...”

“... account of English high society in the last five cantos of Don Juan frequently comes to mind when reading Pückler’s account of its more rigid or frigid lords and ladies, and the relaxed culture of the country house. But in some significant passages his vision is strongly coloured by German Romanticism. No ecclesiastical building still in use impresses him ...”

“... Nivison had recorded art-world gossip, details of their travels, marital problems, what they were reading (often aloud to one another) and watching, and often the step-by-step progress of her husband’s major paintings. Nivison’s impact on Hopper was discussed in Vivien Green Fryd’s book Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward ...”