“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her papers, and rush round when anything went wrong. He brought her recordings of Dylan Thomas (reading Nightwood) and James Joyce – she had never seen a tape-recorder before. After his meetings with her he wrote a diary – published as Life is Painful, Nasty and Short (1990) – in which he would report the conversations they had just had. When O’Neal ...”

“... lamely that ‘many Muslims have failed to respect these limitations.’ His book, based on a reading of the original Arabic sources, offers no explanation as to why some contemporary Muslims have deviated so far from these original principles beyond arguing that Western governments are largely to blame. They have failed to accept the Muslim nation-states ...”

“... We’re filming a history teacher read from Lorimer’s New Testament in Scots, the passage where Peter denies Christ and a servant quean says: ‘yer Galille twang outs ye.’ The interior of the church seems very military. I count 11 crowns among the regimental crests in the war memorial window, two British Legion flags, a drum in a glass case near the ...”

“... Moby Dick – a masterpiece which at the time of publication ‘nobody praised and nobody read’. Reading Jarrell’s praise, Stead wept. She wrote to him: ‘It is quite the loveliest thing that has happened to me in “my literary life”. That is only an expression. I do not have a literary life.’ The republication was a great success. Stead was to have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the ramifications and interrelations of the European secret police . . . Listening to him was like reading a Russian novel.’ Mary Jayne Gold, a contributor to the Committee, was a bit shocked that both Breton and Serge ‘had almost courtly old-school manners . . . so ancien régime’. Lévi-Strauss, meeting him afterwards on the Capitaine Paul ...”

“... Whether they intervened or not, the text is a long way from the original version of Pamela; reading this polished and sometimes decorous narrative, it is hard for the modern reader to see why it ever had such an impact. During Richardson’s lifetime, it had already gone through many revisions. As its printer, Pamela’s author was in an unusually good ...”

“... of the shifts and retractions she comments on.) Several faculty members (including Daniel Bell and Peter Gay) left Columbia because of the student uprising and the generally benign faculty response to it, while the Congress for Cultural Freedom sputtered on for I don’t know how long. Most of the ‘liberal anti-Communists’ of the Fifties and Sixties soon ...”

“... Knussen recognised the affinity, and coupled poems by Trakl and Plath in his Second Symphony, and Peter Maxwell Davies has also set Trakl to music. This new collection is the most substantial so far published in England, and should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 poems, including most of the major ones, is ...”

“... if technically difficult way to decorate a Gothic building, was obtained from the German painter Peter von Cornelius. Hugely popular exhibitions of potential schemes were held in Westminster Hall and much discussed, for the public expected a lot for their money. The scheme was supposed to encourage artists, educate visitors, stimulate the members of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”