“... far than Los Angeles in the past and Athens in the future as a venue for the Olympics,’ stated Peter Warren, Lee Valley’s head of corporate marketing. Lee Valley’s Strategic Business Plan (2000-10) is preparing the ground for change and innovation. ‘The Leisure Centre is an ageing building over 25 years old and the whole complex is subject to ...”

“... slowly part of the way home in his Armstrong Siddeley. In the car he produced a book of poems by James Joyce from the pouch in the door and told me that he read them when he was stuck in traffic jams. He asked, ‘Did you never think of killing yourself?’ but answered the question himself: ‘You would not know whom to kill.’It is astonishing to me, with ...”

“... account of muscular and gestural movement, frame by frame, as we find it in Wyndham Lewis, early Peter Weiss, the Beckett of Watt (the turn of the century Germans even had a word for it: Sekundenstil)? But it is not analytic; it does not break conventional gestures, conventional acts and names (‘I took a carton of milk’) into the ‘neural ...”

“... fundamental shift in perceptions must be underway. Other commentators were even more outspoken. Peter Jenkins in the Independent described the law as ‘an enemy of justice’. He went on: Plainly, after what has happened, radical changes are required in the whole system of police interrogation and in the law relating to confessions. But not only that, the ...”

“... Odd Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody ...”

“... his erstwhile fiancée, Ethne. All this gets pretty tedious and repetitive and rather Henry James-like in its moral ramifications. It’s gone through so often that one wonders whether the repetition is because the book came out originally in serial form. Each chapter certainly has a subheading: ‘Durrance hears news of Faversham’; ‘The House of ...”

“... for him when he returned to make a war movie, The Thin Red Line (1998), which he adapted from James Jones’s novel about the Battle of Guadalcanal. A predatory crocodile slides and slowly sinks into green water to the sound of an ominously sustained chord. Then, over images of a jungle, with sunbeams peering through thick foliage, an unidentified voice ...”

“... tell about it.’ In publishing these stories Bowles joined Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin as one of the pioneers of gay fiction in America. Williams read ‘The Delicate Prey’ while accompanying Bowles to Tangier on the SS Vulcania in December 1948. ‘It was a stormy crossing, and I stayed in my cabin most of the time,’ Bowles ...”

“... Romano, described him as an ‘industrial Saturn … devouring his sons’. The following month, Peter Collins died in a crash at the German Grand Prix. A race steward heard him say ‘like Musso’ before he lost consciousness. In October, Father Leonardo Azzollini wrote an article in the Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica calling for motor racing to be ...”

“... exhausted by working, and miserable that she didn’t have enough time to write. She read instead: James, Woolf (‘I shall go better than she. No children until I have done it’) and Lawrence: ‘Why do I feel I would have known & loved Lawrence – how many women must think this and be wrong!’ They had a lot of morning sex.In June 1958, she had her first ...”

“... the book consists of letters: two to Sarah; several to ‘P – ’, who is Hazlitt’s confidant Peter George Patmore; and three to ‘J.S.K. – ’, or James Sheridan Knowles, recounting the final, farcical agonies of the affair. But the printed Liber Amoris is not the only source. There is a manuscript copy of Part One ...”

“... in 1927, then under the protection of the League of Nations, and like Charles Dickens, Jan Neruda, James Joyce, Theodor Fontane and his acknowledged exemplar Alfred Döblin, he places his native city at the centre of his creative imagination. Grass’s best work so far is given over, again and again, to its evocation: a very special piety ties him to the ...”

“... of a message delivered by Nestor. In the dream Agamemnon is told that Troy is about to fall. In Peter Green’s translation:But now listen well: I bring word to you from Zeus,who though far distant greatly cares for and pities you.He bids you arm the long-haired Achaians for battlewith all speed, for now you may take the broad-streeted cityof the ...”

“... resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was destroying his own career. What Profumo ...”

“... humble/devoted/faithful servant’ – these terms are fossils of what the historian Peter Laslett called ‘the world we have lost’, a world in which virtually all social relations, no matter how intimate, were defined by the language and ideology of service.To sense how this was so, we have only to look at the literature of the early modern ...”