“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... in front of the court itself, a timid-looking, hair-waxed gentleman stops for the cameras. It’s Peter Badge, the Chief Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate: the hearing will take place before him, and he will make the decision as to whether there’s a case to be tried or not. He looks like a little chaffinch. ‘Mr Badge,’ we are told later, ‘is ...”

“... she admired Britten, who set some of her poems, and in the days of their widowhood grew close to Peter Pears. She knew Vaughan Williams (detecting a physical resemblance to T.F. Powys, also to Arthur Machen) and records a significant conversation she had with him while his wife and Gerald Finzi’s were buying things in Valentine Ackland’s antique shop. He ...”

“... likely to cause his downfall. At least this is less bizarre than the bracketing of Gorbachev with Peter the Great and Alexander II as ‘Russian rulers who seized their country by the scruff of the neck and hurled it onto a new level of change and growth’. Quite apart from the highly inappropriate characterisation of Alexander II, the analogy sheds little ...”

“... among which the two children live and play. Although speechless, Pearl is desperate to speak, read and write, praying for St Elmo’s fire up here on the                              Cushat Law to surge her diction down the alphabet trail. She sings ‘at the law’s rim’: So low a nobody I am beneath the cowslip’s ...”

“... of seeing things from another’s point of view.’ For ‘someone else’ and ‘another’ read ‘women’. This book is, in fact, not about men-in-themselves at all, but about men in relation to women. Half the chapters – including most of the long ones, and amounting to about two-thirds of the whole – are exclusively of this sort: with titles ...”

“... at least of the standard questions astrologers answered less pressing. On the other hand, there is Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science (1958), which stresses that Evans-Pritchard had given an account of a coherent, self-sustaining way of making sense of the world, one which ensured that belief in oracles would seem rational. These two interpretations ...”

“... we look at it with comparative indifference. I will venture to say, that no one but a pedant ever read his own works regularly through. They are not his – they are become mere words, waste-paper, and have none of the glow, the creative enthusiasm, the vehemence, and natural spirit with which he wrote them.’ Though it lacks Hazlitt’s momentum and ...”

“... 1983 documentary, The Honourable Member for West Belfast, which relied heavily on the evidence of Peter McMullen, an army deserter who joined the IRA and was at that time fighting extradition from the US (we aren’t told that McMullen later said that he had embellished his account in order to curry favour with the authorities). They repeat the allegation ...”

“... written archives must by now fall open at the right places, marked perhaps by a spent match Peter Black inserted in 1971 or a shrivelled potato chip left behind by Asa Briggs. As for the one or two specific issues Scannell and Cardiff are able to enlarge upon, notably the treatment of unemployment and poverty, they have done so by venturing beyond the ...”

“... with a photograph of the handsome sportsman author. It was that image that got him, before he read Panama and Ninety-Two in the Shade. McGuane isn’t natural casting as a failure. He is a classic writer, in the old Esquire tradition, a lesser James Salter, and a dedicated ladies’ man. Specktor’s chapter on him turns into a synopsis for a screwball ...”

“... selection as the mechanism underlying organic evolution, Spencer remained, even after he had read and approved of The Origin, a staunch Lamarckian, believing that characteristics acquired in the course of a lifetime – the stretch of a giraffe’s neck, say – could be passed on to the next generation. It was this vision of individuals striving to ...”

“... language at the cost of its variety. Before this new translation by Ciaran Carson, perhaps only Peter Whigham, whose version was left unfinished at his death, managed to re-create in English the full orchestra of Dante’s tongues, his ‘strange locust-like phonetics’ (to borrow the extraordinary vocabulary of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation about ...”

“... up a slice of the world that contains several aeons’ worth of fossil-rich strata, which we can read like the lines of a census report. The fossils in most layers did indeed demonstrate a uniform degree of biodiversity, but some indicated a massive decline. Where once there were many different forms of life, suddenly there were few. Palaeontologists and ...”

“... of the various Olympic sites in Sochi. Whoever he was speaking to he would say: ‘Have you read my book about that? You need to read my book about that.’ And he would start making arrangements to send them a pamphlet. His campaign in Sochi was quixotic. This former governor and deputy prime minister, ten years out ...”