“... own account, Irina was born a nonconformist – even sympathising with the Russian equivalent of Peter Rabbit. As soon as she was old enough to count the change, she went out with the other children to stand in the bread queues. At school they had sums to work out, showing how much the State spent on each of them: why was the State so stingy? It was a ...”

“... of virtuoso psychiatrist-bashing. (Both also provided the occasion for first-rate books: on Peter Sutcliffe, Gordon Burn’s Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son and Nicole Ward-Jouve’s The Street-Cleaner; on Dennis Nilsen, Brian Masters’s Killing for Company.) Before the 1981 trial of ...”

“... pal, who played it around the clock. It sold half a million copies. ‘Rocket 88’ is regarded by Peter Guralnick, among others, as the first true example of rock ’n’ roll. ‘I always thought he was kind of a nut,’ Jack Clement, who worked for Sun as a producer and engineer, said of Phillips. ‘I always thought he was full of shit. And he was. And ...”

“... Square West overlaps an area identified by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro as the Seventh Ward, the site of many places famous in Black history: Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church; the Institute for Coloured Youth; the home of Frances E.W. Harper, one of the first Black American women to have her novels published. The official name of the place honours who ...”

“... terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the gratitude of those ...”

“... of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist awakening’ in the last two decades of the 19th century, when the Admiralty’s dogma that ‘the best guarantee for the peace of the world is a supreme British fleet’ became the leading edge of Imperial ...”

“... a much tougher and more able opponent over ten rounds. There were five bouts on the card and Ralph Ward was boxing in the second. By the end of the fight he had been hurt. Quite a few of his companions from the gym were there to cheer him on. Not many bothered to stay for the remaining contests. The following day they were all working in the gym as usual. Bill ...”

“... eighties with a slight, drooping resemblance to Harold Macmillan. Since 1919, he had lived as a ward of psychoanalysis, receiving small retainers from Freud, and then from the Freud Society. An American analyst, Muriel Gardiner, befriended him in 1938, and with great devotion and persistence, managed to persuade him to write his memoirs. When these appeared ...”

“... right enemies (and not find himself finessed so that he’s lined up with Sewell – or the late Peter Fuller) and stay out on the left flank; his fury is rather Victorian – Ruskin’s rage against the immoralism of the Baroque. Oddly enough, Matthew Collings – in the book of his Channel Four series – says many of the same things as Stallabrass; he ...”

“... Paris. Yet this history has been ignored by his successors, who have confined it to the isolation ward of the bibliography while retreating down the more familiar corridors of diplomatic history – what G.M. Young, not completely unfairly, called ‘clerks talking to clerks’ – diverted only by a belated awareness of the importance of economics (thanks ...”

“... hostility to Clark was demonstrated by two incidents not long after his death. In August 1993 Peter Ryan delivered, in the conservative journal Quadrant, an extraordinary attack on Clark’s six-volume History of Australia, which he had shepherded through publication at Melbourne University Press. He was, he said, ashamed to have published it: Clark was a ...”

“... because he was thinking of the sculptures on the tomb of Julius II, out of simple habit, or to ward off the effects of migraine?’ Never mind that earlier in the same paragraph Michelangelo’s mental workings were more directly accessible, so that his splashing his face with water, despite a famous aversion to washing, could be ventriloquised without ...”

“... In 1975 Colin Ward described Spitalfields as a classic inner-city ‘zone of transition’. Bordering on the City of London, the place had traditionally been a densely-populated ‘service centre for the metropolis’ where wave after wave of immigrants struggled to gain a foothold on the urban economy: Huguenot silk weavers, the Irish who were set to work undercutting them, Jewish refugees from late 19th-century pogroms in East Europe, and the Bengalis who have settled in the area since the 1950s ...”

“... Colored Orphan Asylum; elsewhere, blacks were lynched and their property destroyed. The novelist Peter Quinn has identified this moment as crucial for the Irish: it was a fight between two disadvantaged groups to see who was going to wind up bottom of the heap. The Irish won but, judging by Bainbridge Avenue, the war is not over. Though undoubtedly the ...”

“... encouragingly, this book also contains a great deal of love and subversion. In the 12th century, Peter Abelard, having been separated from his wife and son, forcibly castrated and confined to a monastery, nevertheless remained committed to the view that ‘no natural pleasures of the flesh should be counted as sin.’ It should not be considered a fault, he ...”