“... hygiene was so extreme that some of the women believed it must be a power thing. A few knew him as Peter, others as Craig or John. One woman had him in her phone as Blue Van Man. Shown ranks of photographs by detectives, however, the women all pointed to the same man. His name was Iain Packer. He knew Emma, they told the police. He’d had sex with her ...”

“... no, I can quite see how it might fail a seriousness test. (One can almost hear the shade of Peter Cook, intoning regretfully how he ‘never had the reading for the spying’.) Lord Kim, on the other hand, might just about have served, given the fact that H. St John Philby got himself called everything from sahib to tuan all across the British ...”

“... week of the American premiere of The Rake’s Progress – one finds that the boon-companions were Peter Bartok, Edmund Wilson, Fritz Reiner, Rudolph Bing, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Paco Lagerstrom, Auden, Kallman, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Stravinsky was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward ...”

“... by border militarisation itself) is being contained.’ The paradox of US-Mexico integration, as Peter Andreas has identified, is that ‘a barricaded border and a borderless economy are being constructed simultaneously.’ And he is eloquent on the ways that undocumented status is used to keep wages low and employees docile. The 1986 Immigration Reform Act ...”

“... pages put out by the same newspaper on 15 April 1998, in response to the box-office success of James Cameron’s film. The large print captions are devoted to the ‘notable passengers’ and ‘noted men’ on board the ship, and there are extended quasi-obituaries of many of them. But the Times also made an effort to record the names of all the missing ...”

“... questionable practices, such as ‘soft commissions’ to brokers (i.e. kickbacks), that have led Peter Fitzgerald, a Republican senator from Illinois, to describe the savings industry as ‘the world’s largest skimming organisation’. Pension boards should also carry out their own research, something commercial fund managers too often leave to ...”

“... Parliament and involved riots and pamphlet wars; eventually, it led to such songs and poems as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Robert Burns’s ‘A Parcel of Rogues’. A digital search shows that the words ‘Scots’ and ‘Scotland’ occur nowhere in the London-published 1707 Affairs of State. This tells us something more important about ...”

“... near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’. Eliot had referred in 1918 to Henry James’s ‘merciless clairvoyance’ as a perception of relations rather than entities: ‘It is in the chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that ...”

“... one beside the town hall and a second several blocks west. ‘At about 7.30,’ one of them, Peter Blake, remembered, ‘a roar went through the crowd, emanating from the rear. People turned and looked westwards down the street. I saw, to my amazement, a coach being driven fast straight into the back of the crowd. It was a private coach, an ordinary ...”

“... turned to the important question of whom to blame. The initial target was the director of the FBI, James Comey, who in July had refused to indict Mrs Clinton, but criticised her use of an insecure email server while she was secretary of state. A few days before the election, Comey gave notice of another possible violation only to clear her again. A more ...”

“... has in BSkyB, a stake which proved sufficient to have Murdoch’s 30-year-old college dropout son, James, appointed chief executive of the company, in the face of opposition from other shareholders. When I say News Corp is ‘his company’, I mean it’s a company of which he owns about 35 per cent, the exact amount varying from time to time as his ...”

“... wrapped up in themselves; and so it is nice to learn from Reid that the young Hughes loved James Thurber. ‘Alright, have it your way: you heard a seal bark,’ exasperated wife complains to anxious husband in the marital bed, while from behind the headboard a seal, unseen by both, looks attentively at something we shall never see. Thurber’s ...”

“... later played down the importance of his partnership with Ronson. In The Man Who Sold the World, Peter Doggett quotes from an interview with Melody Maker at the beginning of 1976 (though you can’t really trust anything Bowie said in that period): ‘I honestly can’t remember Mick that well these days,’ he said. ‘He’s just like any other band member ...”

“... start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Jack Lemmon, James Mason and Steve McQueen all came to congratulate her after the show. When Judy Garland first heard her sing, she said: ‘I’m never going to open my mouth again.’ Frank Sinatra offered to set his goons on anyone who ‘ever bothers you’. JFK told her ...”

“... on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true vocation and chief talent, and he worked at it tirelessly. The great majority of his numerous poems – he described them, without false modesty, as ...”