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“... gone for some time.’ Roth’s titles have often teased with implied offers of frank confession: Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is preparing to forsake ...”

“... on how a French-speaking Dakar sentry would challenge a stranger. At one point, in her role as Mrs Peter Rodd, she writes to her absentee husband to dissuade him from suing Waugh for libel, telling him that this is the lowest way of making money. Waugh, of course, has no scruples about picking up libel damages, looking on the Daily Express as a milch ...”

“... and Jack Adams, Convenor at BL, Longbridge; not only Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, but Peter Carter, UCATT regional organiser; not only Royden Harrison, professor of social history at Warwick, but Jack Jones and Stan Newens MP; not only Robin Blackburn of New Left Review but Mike le Cornu, shop steward at Heathrow. They all, with remarkably few ...”

“... of Lisa. Thomas has said that, after he had envisaged the earlier part of the novel, it was on reading Kuznetsov’s Babi-Yar that the shape of The White Hotel offered itself: he knew Lisa would end up there. But why was it so obvious? The bold Eros/Thanatos diagram Thomas is intent on constructing is achieved at the expense of the sympathetic realism of ...”

“... the vulgarisation of Christianity, is a barn-door that has been riddled repeatedly by the likes of Peter Simple. The influence of Evelyn Waugh – the Waugh of Decline and Fall – is so marked as to be oppressive. The characters are facetiously named – Father Sporran, the Dundee of Caik, Professor Hairbrush (a philosopher – get it?). Since satire invites ...”

“... and technical virtuosity ... the almost imperceptibly modern, silver-chiming resonance of “Peter Quince at the Clavier” ’. These aspects of the ‘new’ poetry ‘do much to ameliorate popular displeasure’. Certainly under Marianne Moore’s considering eye all the starkness of the new disappears into her own vision of ‘all this fiddle’, as ...”

“... by Francis Hutcheson. This conclusion emerges from what is presented as a study of Jefferson’s reading and writing joined to a detailed analysis of the 18th-century meanings of key expressions in Jefferson’s draft. In so concluding, Wills sets himself against the scholarly tradition on these matters: Carl Becker, Adrienne Koch and Daniel Boorstin all ...”

“... Schwarzkopf writes, ‘now that they knew of my fascination with their culture’. General Sir Peter de la Billière, Britain’s commander in the Gulf War, seems even more smitten with Arab ‘culture’2. ‘I liked and respected Arabs and understood their way of life,’ he announces. ‘I came to appreciate the Arabs well, to appreciate their fine ...”

“... and ‘stubborn’. Both groups then moved on to an ostensibly different task: reading a somewhat ambiguous story about a young man, whom they were then asked to evaluate. The first group thought much more highly of the young man than the second did, presumably because the positive words they had just memorised were more available to ...”

“... marriage, inheritance and the family. While much of the spadework was done by French scholars, Peter Laslett’s The World we Have Lost (1965) was a penetrating attempt to revise the English picture. Authoritative documentation of this new way of thinking came with Tony Wrigley and Roger Schofield’s The Population History of England (1981), a product of ...”

“... assumptions, shared with my family, that equated cleverness with curiosity, politeness and the reading of books. As my father often said of people who might be envied for their bigger wages or pretensions: ‘Aye, but do they have books in the house?’We had books in the house – a bookcase full of them, and more in a bedroom cupboard. Nobody else in my ...”

“... in the US than at home, and America didn’t live up to the image he’d formed during years of reading Hemingway and Dos Passos. He was disgusted by pressure from anti-Soviet groups to exaggerate his suffering in Russia, and disinclined to become a professional émigré dissident. But in New York his career took off. A kind-hearted Slavicist volunteered to ...”

“... rates and restrictions on currency movements was to deal with a crook called Kourillo, ‘a Peter Lorre character’ who was ‘barely five feet tall’ and had a handshake ‘like an empty glove’. (When Kourillo later betrayed him, Fry took out a murder contract and forced him out of Marseille.) A strange and colourful group assembled in ...”

“... of technology, Dirk Leach, adept at mediating his experience of ‘nihilism’ thanks to a careful reading of Heidegger in his tea breaks: ‘About the empty plenitude that I found surrounding me as I worked . . . Heidegger had much to say.’ Realising that if he stayed too long in the factory it would destroy his ability to write, Leach remarks that ...”

“... tanks and publications. Murdoch’s formal politics weren’t always this way. As a young man reading PPE at Oxford he wrote admiring letters to the Australian Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley. In 1970 the Sun supported Harold Wilson and in 1972 Murdoch’s papers, notably the Australian (a national daily he had founded in 1964), supported Gough ...”