“... killed, one assumes, by a Beirut sniper. Richard meanwhile has given up the struggle in the bush for a quieter life in Bush House. Politically, News from Nowhere is over-poweringly pessimistic. Nowhere is where the struggle ends up. But its abstract conclusions will not, I think, constitute the novel’s main interest ...”

“... exits from another. His failure to spot Cairo will very nearly prove fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice him. Spade has failed to understand that a corridor is less a space than a channel of communication through which people, things and messages pass in both ...”

“... drover, ‘a real mystery man’, and wife when the drover offered the couple a cup of tea out bush. She wanted it, he didn’t. By tracing the faultline in a marriage, and identifying the mystery moment in which a rival man wins the woman, Bail’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ anticipates Eucalyptus. Murray Bail was one of the bloke-ish bunch who, back in ...”

“... Duncan, who comes later, is convinced he’s seen Carmen’s son in a sauna near Shepherd’s Bush. He says the hospital is famous for sex-changes. (He wrote a book on April Ashley and knows a lot about it.) I ask it he will come with me and talk to Caroline about her experiences. We can pretend we’re smokers and approach her outside the lifts, where ...”

“... I was so angry​ ,’ Peter Matthiessen said late in his life of his early days as a writer. ‘I was constantly in a contest … with my father.’ He’d grown up rich in Connecticut and New York, attended Yale, but found himself in ‘combat with the world’ for reasons he couldn’t understand; his early novels reflect this ...”

“... of each other in 1934, they grew up in a family of ten in a two-bedroom flat in Shepherd’s Bush. In the early 20th century, Jane Martinson writes in You May Never See Us Again, identical twins tended to be ‘treated almost as a single entity’. David and Frederick would often dress in matching clothes, a habit they retained for most of their ...”

“... by border militarisation itself) is being contained.’ The paradox of US-Mexico integration, as Peter Andreas has identified, is that ‘a barricaded border and a borderless economy are being constructed simultaneously.’ And he is eloquent on the ways that undocumented status is used to keep wages low and employees docile. The 1986 Immigration Reform Act ...”

“... would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter Porter. He was an Australian immigrant in London, and had written a lot of poems, but published relatively few; she was a nurse who seemed ‘very English’ in accent and tastes, and was admired for having a figure like a ballet dancer. They set up home ...”

“... were aware that others weren’t so fortunate. During trips to London, Michael and his brother, Peter, helped serve food in East End soup kitchens and were taken along to suffragist meetings. Tippett attended his first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky at the Queen’s Hall. When the Great War began, the Hôtel ...”

“... will not die! Why should I die! ‘If it is because of my perverse words, spoken at the burning bush, when I heard you say, mouth to mouth, “You shall put the words in Aaron’s mouth”; when I sinfully answered: “I am slow of speech,” and angered You who give man speech – if this is my crime, blot it out and do not call it to mind!’ And the ...”

“... of Russian power after 2000 that fuelled a series of ugly confrontations. In Who Lost Russia? Peter Conradi attempts a more balanced view, providing a brisk run-through of the post-Cold War era in which both Russia and the West are faulted for a string of misguided moves. A correspondent in Moscow from 1988 to 1995, and now foreign editor of the Sunday ...”

“... imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent afterword reminds us, Barton’s interest in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem ...”

“... usually explain the set-up early and clearly. The game can’t start until you know the rules. Peter Carter, falling to earth in his burning plane, accepts his designated death, but falls in love with the radio operator June and thereby somehow falls past it. The rest of A Matter of Life and Death follows from this anomalous case of physical (rather than ...”

“... to collaborate was impressive, especially in the case of the ‘Dream Team’ of Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl. On the other hand, to be in the running one had to be a designated über-architect, presumably with the technical expertise required of grands projets: stock in the Dream Team, Lord Foster and the Skidmore Owings ...”

“... as the underlying phrase ‘Because I say so.’ He’s not keeping bad company. It’s clear that Peter Greenaway makes films in the same sort of way, imposing sets of rules on himself before he constructs a narrative or creates character (if he ever gets round to that). Peter Reading has taken a similar tack in his ...”