“... and the present owner, dated 1999, and a letter and note to Laukamp from an Egyptologist called Peter Munro at the Free University of Berlin, dated 1982, conveying an analysis of the contents of the papyri by a colleague of his, Professor Fecht. That was all.While lamenting the meagreness of the provenance materials, King was reluctant to discuss the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he gives us this short paragraph about Viri’s general state of being: His friends were Arnaud, Peter, Larry Vern. All friends are friends in a different way. Arnaud was his closest friend; Peter, his oldest. But what comes next is this: He lingered before the counter, his eye passing over coloured bolts of ...”

“... at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 June 1965. I’d watched the Peter Whitehead video. American poets in those days, with their crisper sense of history and occasion, wore suits and ties. I’d read the free-wheeling interviews in fugitive magazines, such as Arthur and Kit Knight’s The Beat Diary. I’d clocked Corso, along ...”

“... and the Colonial World. The early chapters consider a number of classic accounts of anthropophagy. Peter Hulme shows how the brief report of the ship’s doctor on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493, itself based on circumstantial evidence, was blown up out of all proportion by subsequent editors. Four or five human bones stolen from an abandoned village on ...”

“... Details’ and ‘The General’. This summer, I found it greatly moving to hear him reading in that unobtrusive voice ‘Died of Wounds’, on a recording retrieved from the British Library archive:The ward grew dark; but he was still complainingAnd calling out for ‘Dickie’. ‘Curse the wood!It’s time to go, O Christ, and what’s the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... haven’t read her biography); not to mention Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, Peter Brazeau’s disciplined and rather stylish oral biography from 1983.It is Brazeau who supplies a fascinating list of Stevens’s annual earnings; who has the more picturesque quotations (about a place in the Old South where you could get ‘oyster stew from ...”

“... such as the regime’s diplomacy in the Baltic – were inspired as much by Cassiodorus’ reading of Tacitus as by any realistic knowledge of the Aesti. Much of the interest of the Variae lies in their deliberately cultured and recherché content, though reading any quantity of late Roman officialese requires a ...”

“... more eventful. Not only do I hardly drink and Rupert neither, but I don’t know anyone who does, Peter Cook about the only drunk I’ve ever known. In New York in the 1980s I used to like a screwdriver. Two was my limit, with three making me tipsy, which I found delightful. Had I been able to remain in that intermediate state I suppose I could have been a ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... many ways of life to an end, including our own. The stakes could hardly be higher. Why then does reading about it so often feel like reading about any other dysfunctional workplace? The relentless backstabbing and arse-licking seem out of kilter with the seriousness of the situation. It makes for a deeply strange and ...”

“... Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I persevered, and even persuaded my history teacher to allow me to do an extended A-Level essay on Wordsworth’s political beliefs. I chugged ...”

“... mina, shekel and apportionments of silver’. Belshazzar demanded exegesis. The winner of the reading competition was one of the Judaean deportees, the magico-mythical Daniel. Not only can Daniel read Aramaic – why ‘the astrologers, the Chaldeans and the soothsayers’ could not remains a mystery – but he goes further, producing a virtuoso display ...”