“... well. While some increase in luxury was an inevitable concomitant of commercial progress, Dr Peter Kürn wrote in 1792, when the sum of sensual pleasures surpasses the sum of more noble and more useful pursuits, when natural needs can no longer be distinguished from the crowd of imagined and fantastic ones, when reason does not choose, but only ...”

“... contemporaries – who included James Baldwin, Paddy Chayefsky, Richard Avedon and Sugar Ray Robinson – the only one to make an impression on him was a classmate who used an easy flow of patter to sell his fellow students subscriptions to the New York Times.At seventeen he found a job at Timely Comics, which later became Marvel, through a family ...”

“... Robert Briscoe sought refuge for ten Jewish families. A minute on the matter was prepared by Peter Berry from the Department of Justice, who was later to become one of the most powerful Irish civil servants: There is a strong anti-Jewish feeling in this state which is particularly evident to the Aliens Section of the Department of Justice. Sympathy for ...”

“... probably started the rot and then there was Glyn Daniel and his bow ties and today it’s Tony Robinson capering about professing huge excitement because of the uncovering of the (entirely predictable) foundations of a Benedictine priory at Coventry. His enthusiasm is anything but infectious and almost reconciles one to the bulldozer. And there’s always ...”

“... reading both novels at the same time. Like Vendredi, Michel Tournier’s subaltern rewrite of Robinson Crusoe, Meursault, contre-enquête wrests the narrative away from the settler. In his fruitless search through L’Etranger for a sign of his brother’s name, Haroun encounters the word ‘Arab’ 25 times, while the indignity of namelessness is driven ...”

“... according to the documents which the British officials had, but between two men called Kuhn and Robinson. The lower jaw, eight ribs, several vertebrae, arm bones, shoulder bones, a number of smaller bones and the skull, virtually intact and still covered with bits of the shroud, were found and put into a coffin. The bones belonged to a man of exceptional ...”

“... Dowie, Jimmy Dyce, Charlie Logan, Margaret Logan, Bert Lumsden, George Manclark, Derek Stubbs, Peter Young and also Alex Falconer’). As this shows, they didn’t all have to be men, but usually they were. There is no doubt that Brown tried to re-create these bonds with groups of personal allies throughout his political career, and he often succeeded. His ...”

“... tenants. The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a ...”

“... Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a mystery, and how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on ...”

“... the idea of entertaining ‘at home’ made perfect sense in the buoyant Eisenhower economy. As Peter J. Levinson puts it in September in the Rain (2001), his useful biography of Sinatra’s arranger, Nelson Riddle: ‘It was the decade of the suburban house, the six o’clock cocktail shaker and the regulation grey flannel suit … Beautiful love songs ...”

“... Higher Ambitions: The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy, produced by BIS in 2009 when Peter Mandelson was the minister. It should also be remembered that it was a Labour government that first introduced tuition fees (in 1998) and then ‘variable fees’ (in 2006). Variable fees turned out, of course, not to be variable, as all universities very ...”

“... his writing. Zuckerman first appeared in My Life as a Man, but as the creation of another writer, Peter Tarnopol, rather than Roth. This is really a new start for him. Zuckerman is at a crossroads, having written stories based on his New Jersey Jewish background that have caused offence within the family. (There are many points of correspondence between ...”

“... have known of later privatisations in Pinochet’s Chile. Until Bel’s recent research it was Peter Drucker, in his writings about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the ...”

“... London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life. ‘He would,’ as James wrote in his preface, ‘become most acquainted with destiny in the form of a lively inward revolution.’ For any action ...”

“... and Marco Tardelli’s primal scream (Spain 1982); Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ leap over Peter Shilton (Mexico 1986); Frank Rijkaard’s fleck of gob caught mid-parabola towards Rudi Völler’s perm, and Gazza’s tears, and Maradona’s tears (Italy 1990); Roberto Baggio’s penalty soaring over the bar (USA 1994); Zinedine Zidane walking past the ...”