“... there earlier this year while waging ‘a defensive war’. It was a mark of Peter Hain’s extreme unpopularity in the Labour Party – he came fifth for the deputy leadership in an unimpressive field of six – that he had to find someone across the Atlantic to defend him over his undeclared donations, as Evans did last year. More ...”

“... and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees.’ The problem in Madar’s reading was not just censorship but torture, which ‘as Manning well knew, remained a common practice among the Iraqi authorities even six years into the American occupation’. ‘Enhanced interrogation’ was very much Rumsfeld’s bag. In 2005 ...”

“... filmmaker, and knew what he was doing: each of his books attests to a preparatory period of heavy reading, language instruction and patient bureaucratic path-clearing. When challenged by men in uniform he always has the right permit and he’s often well-supplied with addresses of friends-of-friends. But his advance arrangements are kept behind a curtain ...”

“... urban for its outer-suburban context’. Hatherley is even more ensorcelled by Alison and Peter Smithson’s béton brut behemoth, Robin Hood Gardens in East London (shown above). For him the Smithsons are the real heroes, and a half-century on he reprises Reyner Banham – with dialectical knobs on – by placing them and their fellow New Brutalists ...”

“... and every poem. Some thirty unfinished poems, published after his death, are also very much worth reading, but are not included in either edition. Cavafy said that his poems fell into three categories: poems which are not precisely ‘philosophical’ but provoke thought; historical poems; and hedonistic or aesthetic poems. The first tend to be didactic, the ...”

“... to think of Princess Diana, who, allowing for weight and age, triggers many of the same responses. Reading about the huge crowds that sang the Claimant to Newgate and greeted him on his release and crowded into Paddington Cemetery for his pauper’s funeral, one cannot help thinking of that eerie wail that ran along the waiting crowds as Diana’s funeral ...”

“... travelling in Italy with her parents; he was the family’s doctor in Rome. They had two children, Peter and Malcolm, and remained technically married until his death in 1949, though they spent very little time together and he saw almost nothing of his sons as they were growing up. ‘There seems to have been no question of passionate love on Axel’s ...”

“... rejected by our more powerful pundits of musical taste’ – Hans Keller, William Glock and Peter Heyworth. For someone like Keller, the gatekeeper of the debate about new music in the 1960s and 1970s, Cardew was a godsend: Keller might not agree with what he wrote, but he enjoyed orchestrating the subsequent controversy. Cardew became known not just as ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 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 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 ...”

“... of how the Milton Keynes Development Corporation lived through that sea-change makes for painful reading. The corporation had wanted to sustain a mixed ecology of buyers and renters, but as state subsidies dried up following the 1976-77 financial crisis, the corporation had to sell in order to keep building – and, once Thatcher’s policies took hold, at 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 ...”