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“... reads her his school set books: Homer, Lessing, Schiller; and after that, War and Peace. ‘Reading to her, showering with her, making love to her, and lying next to her for a while afterwards – that became the ritual in our meetings.’ But the idyll is not perfect. Hanna is subject to unpredictable fits of pique and fury; once she strikes Michael ...”

“... with a short biography, in the recently reissued In ‘Vanity Fair’, by Roy Matthews and Peter Mellini).* When she was 20 she was painted by G.F. Watts, who was besotted with her and called her his Bambina. At the height of her notoriety she was caricatured in Punch and elsewhere. In her last days she had a deathbed photograph taken of herself, all ...”

“... the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From the maudlin Tom and Viv to Peter Ackroyd’s unauthorised Life and Carole Seymour-Jones’s Painted Shadow, the collateral damage, too, has been heavy. Even now, much about Eliot remains opaque: 13 years after the first volume of his letters appeared, we can only speculate as to what ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with Aesop, whom Herodotus describes as a ‘logos-maker’ (logopoios). Herodotus, in her reading, is experimenting with literary genres, weaving Aesopic fictions into his history proper, and inviting his reader to feel the tension. With his mixed-race background – he was from Halicarnassus in southern Turkey – Herodotus apparently identified with ...”

“... a man without descendants, literally without aftergrowth. In Julie Orringer’s English, based on Peter Esterházy’s Hungarian, Kafka becomes a ‘barren man’, which in Laurent Binet’s French becomes ‘cet homme desséché’, this dried-up man. This man finally, in Tom McCarthy’s version, has a ‘dried-out … life’. The Vila-Matas story comes ...”

“... her father as a fanatic, yelling on street corners, passing out pamphlets to people incapable of reading them. Unable to save souls, he longed for martyrdom, nearly succeeding during the Boxer Rebellion. She was ashamed of him and feared him; comfort was to be found with her Chinese amah and playmates, and she married as soon as she could. Her ...”

“... some other cities. The legislation which brought in Asbos, she explains, came out of a New Labour reading of the American ‘Communitarian’ movement that encouraged ministers to believe they could deliver good public behaviour. She describes the cowed and restrictive culture which resulted in Salford, where the least street gathering of teenagers was likely ...”

“... personal adventures and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by ...”

“... was, until recently, a secondary school teacher). The nature of his writing has been described by Peter Riley, in A Poetry in Favour of the World (1997), as ‘non-persuasive’, avoiding ‘the rhetorical habits which are so dominant in Western poetry’. By this Riley seems to mean that Langley lets his experience tell its own story, without the ...”

“... Reviews of Modern Physics. There have always been two traditions in metaphysics, characterised by Peter Strawson as ‘descriptive’ and ‘revisionary’. Descriptive metaphysics seeks to uncover how we do, or more ambitiously must, conceptualise the world we find ourselves in. Revisionary metaphysics seeks, by contrast, to show that our ordinary thinking ...”

“... for they couldn’t draw on the social knowledge that tells them which authors are worth reading and which are cranks, whose results can be relied on and whose should be viewed with suspicion. They could not invoke the essentially social trust – a major focus of Shapin’s work – that allows them to be confident that what is in the bottle ...”

“... our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a ...”

“... wants us to think about. The Refusal of Time was inspired, in part, by his discussions with Peter Galison, a Harvard physicist and historian of science. Galison wrote a witty, difficult text to accompany the piece on its first outing in Kassel, but if you imagine time as a container ship of inconceivable dimensions filling up with endless ...”

“... argued that that a second resolution would be required – as had the attorney general, Sir Peter Goldsmith. Tony Blair himself had tried to secure a second resolution. But then, just as the negotiations for a second resolution – handled by Greenstock – failed, the attorney general changed his view, declaring that Resolution 1441 itself revived the ...”