“... routines didn’t need to be solemn: on one occasion she and Roy sifted poetry submissions by reading them aloud in a Barnsley accent. Anything that didn’t produce hysterical laughter went forward for further consideration. When Roy’s father died she volunteered to help with the catering after the funeral, but made herself scarce when family arrived ...”

“... reason alone (and there were others – he has an enjoyably robust style), he was always worth reading on a Sunday morning. He was in some ways The Word Made Flesh, and that was presumably why he was a welcome member of the Major campaign team during the second ballot of the Tory leadership contest. Unemployed as he was, he no doubt wrote many of those ...”

“... along comes Jim Angleton, he looks at the material and says: ‘Aha! You’ve got something here, Peter. This makes sense to me, even if it doesn’t to you. Thanks very much.’ And off he would go to fit that sliver of information into some horrendously complex pattern. At least that’s what he said he did, and you felt proud and honoured and rewarded for ...”

“... this picture has of late been injected with new life and massively disseminated by the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, whose veneer of shocking realism and occasional flights of pure fancy hardly conceal its basic reinscription of the romantic image. It was time for scholars to hit back, and Amadeus was cited by H.C. Robbins Landon as a main reason for ...”

“... never can taste the joy of Elysium, because it is a spiritual joy & they cannot perceive it. When Peter Gay wrote about the sensual life of the Victorians, he cited the Hawthornes as an exemplary pair, remarking how their talk of ‘holy’ kisses sanctified their evident delight in the satisfactions of the flesh. But Herbert is more inclined to emphasise the ...”

“... but from Habermas, Lawrence Klein, Howard Caygill, Terry Eagleton and Bakhtin, as restated by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The result is both fashionably cultural-materialist and safely old art-historical, supposing paintings to be socially determined primarily by discursive texts of the sort art historians require to explain an artist’s ...”

“... is dead. The second QC brought in to prosecute Judith Ward, then a rising star at the bar called Peter Taylor QC, is now the Lord Chief Justice. From his office and from that of Mr Walsh there has been not a single expression of explanation or regret about the conviction of Judith Ward as a result of their own failure to disclose the evidence which might ...”

“... of what became known as Supergun. At once they prosecuted the people they thought responsible: Peter Mitchell, managing director of the firm Walter Somers, which made the barrel, and a Bristol engineer, Chris Cowley, who had worked on the Supergun project in Iraq. The massive steel structures they had seized at Teesport provided Customs officers with the ...”

“... him to be a ‘mulierast’, and that Bosie was rumoured to have taken to an eyeglass, after reading the case of a Major Parkinson who cut his throat with a bit of glass in a Holloway cell. Max’s was a tough, unsentimental world, but could combine both feeling and elegance with toughness. If Max really was leading a double life – a pleasurable but ...”

“... glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a joiner’s son. We have here a miniature blueprint for late Elizabethan theatrical tastes: Marlowe the tragedian, whose thunderous poetry packed them in at the public theatres; Lyly the author of ...”

“... in touch with nature, you had to have spent some time away from it, quite possibly in a library, reading about what you had missed. Environmentalism is a reactionary force, and it has in its time contained some appalling reactionaries. The Nazis were keen on wholegrain bread, and against artificial colourings and preservatives in food; the SS controlled 75 ...”

“... you) by insisting on presenting herself as the more interesting of the two. There is no point in reading Dr Cook’s book for insight into the politics and the personalities with whom Robin Cook was involved. She met Gordon Brown just after her marriage, but has ‘little remaining impression of Gordon, whom I have met only once or twice since then, and he ...”

“... was supposedly William Maginn, who retaliated for Bulwer-Lytton’s caricature of him as Peter MacGrawler in Paul Clifford by using his position as editor of Fraser’s Magazine to publish a series of wounding articles about Bulwer-Lytton’s novels. ‘Illustrious Vidocq’, as Bulwer-Lytton called him, was the inspiration for the ambivalent ...”

“... that Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came in various shapes and sizes depending on the musical context (the ‘wedding shawm’, for example, consisted of one ‘male’ and one ...”

“... order to report to Major Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight in civilian life). Carol Reed and Peter Ustinov had been likewise commandeered, and the little group were told to produce a film to boost the British troops’ flagging morale. It was made, then aborted as subversive by the War Office; enough influential people had liked it, however, to ensure ...”