“... Tom McClintock, the inestimable Arianna Huffington and the former Baseball League Commissioner Peter Ueberroth. By no coincidence, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy – on the Jay Leno Tonight show – on the day Issa withdrew. It was clear from the outset that if a ‘No on Recall’ vote supporting Davis failed to pass by even a slight ...”

“... and the war in Kosovo that were manifestly being driven principally from 10 Downing Street and the White House. He also had to sit tight and accept a great many heavy-handed attempts to impose the will of Number 10 on local Labour organisations – the Welsh Assembly and the London mayoral contest were notable examples. Well before the 2001 election, John ...”

“... was one of shiny appliances, finned automobiles with hood ornaments fit for Vikings, black and white television sets piping perky laugh-track entertainment into the living room as the kids did their homework lying on the rug, backyard barbecues, pool parties, and drunken passes and spats at cocktail parties that entered local lore. Updike’s early stories ...”

“... Governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw sees her first ghost, that of the wicked valet Peter Quint, the words she uses to describe the event – which initially persuades her that her ‘imagination’ has ‘turned real’, in the person of her handsome employer – are words in which Hamlet is remembered. ‘It was plump, one afternoon, in the ...”

“... reminiscences over the teacups. The story that Mai Zetterling told of her encounter with Peter Sellers and Kingsley Amis, at the time of the filming of Only Two Can Play, moves easily enough from life to fiction. ‘Want to see my Aertexes?’ asks the disgraceful Rex Martin, the Amis offprint. What happens is that world fits within world like a ...”

“... Hollywood exile, where, in one photo, he stares at the camera wearing sunglasses and sporting a white goatee, the very picture of the playboy philosopher – a fucked-out burn-out who still has a seductive way with words. To borrow a word from Norman Mailer, Tynan was a sexologue – an ideologue about sex. He was an admirer of the renegade psychoanalyst ...”

“... a secular one, and represents nothing more than the religious yearning of a non-religious age. Peter Ackroyd’s dignified, often eloquent biography offers a picture of More which is a combination of Catholic admiration and scholarly determinism. Ackroyd has soaked himself in late medieval history; happily, he does not pretend to conduct a historical ...”

“... living together and sometimes apart, and each of them with lovers.Luke had an older brother, Peter, whom both Luke and I idealised in absentia. Peter had left behind a collection of 1960s Marvel comics in sacrosanct box files. These included a nearly complete run of The Fantastic Four, the famous 102 issues drawn by ...”

“... given Brown a lot to think about over the summer. In July this year, the Australian treasurer, Peter Costello, finally spilled the beans about the deal that he said had been struck with Prime Minister John Howard in 1994, whereby Howard had agreed to give up the top job after serving for a term and a half, paving the way for Costello to succeed him. Such a ...”

“... an adoration for his men and admired their cheerful stoicism as much as their shining faces and white bodies – although, as Wilson reminds us, he was never to take a working-class lover. His powers of observation seemed to sharpen, too. Some of the descriptions in his war diaries are among the best things he ever wrote:As I sit in the sun in a nook among ...”

“... at school, a jersey and skirt at training college, ‘my schizophrenic fancy dress’, a ‘white smock, white shoes and a starched cap’, things made of weird new fabrics such as ‘everglaze’, a longed-for skirt of ‘terylene’ with permanent pleats, a ‘dull green overcoat’, the slacks Sargeson preferred ...”

“... up his sleeve. This was an illusion he encouraged, and there was some pleasure in sharing it. Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and ...”

“... canny, entertaining book Surf’s Up – a summa theologica of Beach Boy lore and legend – Peter Doggett sums it up: ‘As ever with Brian and the past … the details altered sharply in each new telling.’ Sometimes during the course of the same interview. As if this or that reminiscence were simply one more of the musical ‘feels’ he said flowed ...”

“... the essential, the thrilling thing was to ‘smack the pansies down’. The period covered by Peter Parker’s astonishing two-volume compilation culminates in the pansies’ at least partial vindication, the long deferred passage of the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations into law in 1967. Together these books present for the first time an assemblage ...”

“... so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in ...”