“... resent is that most of Shelley’s poems – except for ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ and ‘Peter Bell the Third’, which might have been written by a good Augustan – were written by Julian rather than by Maddalo. Such readers have always wanted ‘heard melodies’ to sound for ‘those unheard’, and they deride as spiritual vanity any apparently ...”

“... author (George Gilder), a leading radical economist (Tom Weisskopf) and the creator of Jaws (Peter Benchley). About a quarter of us had come to Harvard from one of ten famous boarding schools of the northeast, but about a half had attended public high schools across the country. With its massive endowments supporting extensive scholarships, Harvard had ...”

“... of paintings and drawings; Claudia Stumpf deals with the ‘Expedition into Sicily’ and Peter Funnell with the more general critical writings: A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805), and An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (1818). Individually the chapters are ...”

“... human evil. The unvarnished records of the Auschwitz trials have yielded a work of some stature in Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, and even the sub-genre of the memoirs of Hitler’s dog has achieved ironic elevation in Grass’s Hundejahre. Closer to home, Michael Hamburger has devoted himself to bringing German poetry before us and to maintaining its ...”

“... writing on Coalbrookdale by Night, then the reader, whether they agree or not, gains by the reading. The history of art cannot be the history of art alone, but it must take the art into account. If the argument wanders too far from the picture then Panofsky’s arch will overbalance and the critic with it. To suggest, as David Solkin does in his ...”

“... that history did generate; we can posit different choices but not different choosers. If I am reading Hawthorn correctly, he believes that a counter-factual based on mere chance, such as the sudden death of a major agent, is unwarranted and produces no interesting insight. At the same time, in conjuring up plausible alternative histories, he eloquently ...”

“... or Crichton himself discredited in some fabricated scandal. Crichton’s insipid hero, Detective Peter Smith, is an officer in the diplomatic section of the Los Angeles Police Department. His task is to investigate a murder committed during the glitzy opening party for the American headquarters of the Nakamoto Corporation. The narrative proceeds on a twin ...”

“... 1941 Anglo-German war. That Churchill was addicted to war is certainly beyond dispute. One reading of his often brilliant observations about nuclear weapons (the 1955 ‘Balance of Terror’ speech said it all) is that he deplored them more than most people, as the final and complete ruination not just of mere boring peace, but of the splendid ...”

“... if it was a sin to shorten life, it must also be a sin to prolong it. An Anglican divine, Canon Peter Green, pointed out about a hundred years ago that it wasn’t easy for a society that sanctioned capital punishment to maintain that only God could give or take life. And so the hypocrisies went on. In one form or another they still do. And so do the ...”

“... his subject was the way that architecture evolved, and it is tempting to wonder whether, reading him, it may have become easier to conceive of the evolution of the species.Some​ of the more severe scholars described here may have preferred to be regarded as historians or archaeologists rather than as antiquaries, given that the latter were closely ...”

“... aahing, sentimental and nostalgic, with every mention of black Levis worn with Doctor Martens, of Peter Frampton and Art Gartfunkel, of homebrew wine at the parents’ house and fancy wine when you get invited round by old college friends who have done much better for themselves than you have. In an earlier draft of this article, I tried to construct a little ...”

“... however, the trend was in the opposite direction: the internal passport regime introduced by Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century was long retained as a regulator of movement. The Russian internal passport on the eve of the First World War identified its holders (men only) by title or rank, religion, marital status and liability for ...”

“... with ever equal and even skill and patience.’ The guides seem designed for two people: one reading from the book, the other taking in what’s being described as they look on. (Lola died in 1963; Pevsner’s later journeys were usually made with students from the Courtauld.) The first edition of the Suffolk guide was published in 1961; it was revised ...”

“... a prism through which to look at the changes in Russian society is inspired. His book is not light reading: the story is complex and he has done a lot of research (if readers want to try something less demanding first, they can go to his article, ‘Soviet Exurbia: Dachas in Postwar Russia’, in the Crowley and Reid collection).1 But it shows Lovell to be a ...”

“... if she didn’t seem to have been perfectly content with her existence. In his biography of Freud, Peter Gay quotes Martha’s reply to a letter of condolence after Freud’s death that it was ‘a feeble consolation that in the 53 years of our marriage there was not a single angry word between us, and that I always tried as much as possible to remove the ...”