“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of France’s fortifications along its eastern border with Germany. Donald and his brother, Peter, are not yet proficient enough in English to understand the text, so Joe translates it into German:The essential points of the French system, which was carried out on a gigantic scale, are as follows: a line of fortified casemates giving each other mutual ...”

“... as of the continual experimentation involved, he moved to Berlin to work in the office of Peter Behrens, ‘a colossus of daunting stature’. He had no contact with Behrens himself, but did learn about ‘rhythm and subtle relations and many other things previously unknown to me’. That admission must have cost him dear: he was strikingly ungrateful ...”

“... forthright about Dickens’s unrelenting coldness to his mother and his wife. More centrally, his reading of Dickens’s late work – the novels, stories and the first-person journalism – show how far it reflects events in his life. Dickens spent his last years in constant travel and increasing pain. He moved between his house, Gad’s Hill, and his ...”

“... visit, during a tour in crippling heat of the ruined fortifications constructed around the port by Peter the Great, Wilhelm again forgot his instructions and buttonholed the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, on one of his latest hobby-horses, the need to establish a pan-European oil trust to compete with American Standard Oil. The ...”

“... there for 12,000 years before the Europeans showed up. Printers vied to slake the thirst of the reading public for tidings of points west. Utopia was duly mapped as an island somewhere in the west Atlantic. More did his best to give its physical being credibility: Ambrosius Holbein, Hans’s elder brother, furnished a woodcut of it for the 1518 Basel ...”