“... retired now but that’s what I was doing when I started writing this: I wrote and I waited to get Peter’s dinner out of the oven. Peter got 24-hour care, and I did three seven-hour shifts a week. I enjoyed the connectedness that working always gave me, the benchmarks at the end of every shift: pill box empty, kitchen ...”

“... eyes, smiling the cheerful smile of the dead, Munditia still greets visitors to the Church of St Peter in her glass case. Since the late 17th century she has served as the patroness and protector of single, unmarried women. Her feast day, traditionally celebrated with great ceremony, falls on 17 November. Koudounaris describes the miraculous cures that the ...”

“... with public money, isn’t it a bit rich to ask people to pay a second time for the privilege of reading the results? It costs money, of course, to digitise an academic journal and put it online, and to maintain it in a usable form. Even old articles that are out of copyright have to be scanned, uploaded, proofread and made searchable. Physical journals have ...”

“... the notion of Purgatory. At least one version of ‘St Patrick’s Purgatory’, told by Peter of Cornwall, features a trusting knight who is betrayed again and again by shape-shifters and visions. His vision is presented as a sight of Purgatory, but Green remarks that ‘we are dealing here with a barely Christianised account of the dangerous ...”

“... 1981 recalled that his science education ‘to the age of almost thirty, depended entirely on reading the popular works of men like Julian Huxley, Wells, Haldane, Jeans, Eddington and Infeld … the ideas I got from them were profound, not superficial’). Haldane intended all his articles to contain information unavailable in textbooks, ‘and which a ...”

“... depends on the use of music and auditory effects: Birds, for instance, created a drama almost like Peter and the Wolf out of the different instruments associated with different birds. Stage directions never provoke a laugh, but actual stage business often does. The gap between the experience of watching a performance and ...”

“... The voiceover narrative, written by Geoffrey Ward, is remorseless and untheatrical, just as Peter Coyote’s spoken narration is dry, unaccented and a little formal, as if reading out a casualty report. But Burns and Novick seem to understand how specious it would be to make this a tidy, organised report – a history ...”

“... the kind of scrutiny ordinarily reserved for the novels of Henry James. John Sutherland has been reading and rereading Orwell ever since the 1954 BBC dramatisation of Nineteen Eighty-Four alerted him to the novel’s existence. So he feels under no constraint either to bless or to damn a writer whose ‘inextinguishability’ will ensure that he continues to ...”

“... the gaps between coaching young composers and instrumentalists, running courses on chamber music, reading new scores and attending concerts. Once he joined the BBC, he was a full-time editor, producer, broadcaster and administrator. His mind worked best in the heat of immediate controversy. He loved a sparring partner and his brightest interventions are ...”

“... think that he could refute scepticism. On this last point he disagreed with Kant (on one natural reading of him), and agreed with Heidegger. The former thought it ‘a scandal to philosophy ... that the existence of things outside us ... must be accepted merely on faith, and that if any one sees fit to doubt their existence we are unable to counter his ...”

“... democracy, the one we’re riding now, to Portugal in 1975. Prompted by these events and a wider reading, Anderson’s view of history changed. ‘National fortunes,’ he wrote last year, looking back over his old essays on Ukania and replying to his critics, ‘are not just fates inscribed in industrial birth-certificates. They are also formed by variable ...”

“... in Europe: they have been virtually eliminated, according to Mitford, in the United States. Peter Chamberlen, a Huguenot barber-surgeon whose family settled in London, invented the forceps in 1588. The family kept it a secret for over a hundred years, travelling about to attend the births of those wealthy enough to pay for their ministrations. Not only ...”

“... pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career as a police informer. Mokaba has become so prominent that it would be embarrassing for the ANC leadership to admit to this, so we suddenly found him cropping up at Mandela’s side to welcome ...”

“... half-dozen really distinguished musical works, Motion would hardly have a book at all. Even when reading about Constant’s development and interaction with the great (Diaghilev, the Sitwells), one is often keener to learn of the luck his rival and friend William Walton was having. Walton’s history lurks in the shadows of the Lambertian narrative, and his ...”

“... a slight resentment towards translations, and in his clever ‘Poem Waiting to be Translated’, Peter Porter asks: Why not remember the heroes of hard situations, those who answered inquisitors in fresh parables, whose lyrical rejoinders are assembled here in memorial Penguins? Porter is glancing at the work of Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, and ...”