“... 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 ...”

“... outright mimicry further dissolve the boundaries between these killers. Jack Owen Spillman began reading about Bundy when he moved to Tacoma as a boy, and later adopted him as a role model. With so many of them in business at the same time, it became hard for investigators to be sure which butcher was responsible for which newly discovered corpse, and in ...”

“... Labour Party figures. One of these pieces had come in and been edited by Mary-Kay, and Karl was reading it in proof. ‘Johnson is like some beast from the pampas,’ Karl said, admiringly and amusedly, ‘who’s brought in, and immediately rushes around butting everybody.’ No such animal is known to zoology, and Bill Johnson has no known connection with ...”

“... of its politics and examines its weaknesses. Both books will be painful and often infuriating reading for anyone who was at all sympathetic to these politics, but Jones has the harder task: to assess the failure of a project he championed, in which he was a significant player, and which depended on the work and was damaged by the flaws of people he is ...”

“... knowing even the most elementary facts about the intelligence services their taxes pay for. The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither ...”

“... bodies could not be reassembled, bones picked from the mud. ‘The government of the time,’ Peter Ashley wrote in his English Heritage booklet, Lest We Forget (2004), ‘refused to acknowledge the concept of the repatriation of the dead, so these monuments became the focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a ...”

“... the actor is the same, Rudolf Klein-Rogge.By 1933 Lang had made his first sound film, M, with Peter Lorre as the child murderer who is caught and tried by criminals rather than cops: the trouble he is causing is bad for business, and the criminals are also full of moral indignation. The film’s original title was Murderer among Us, and the story goes ...”

“... Bailey’s England, First and Last is a book for future social historians as well as nostalgic reading for his contemporaries. Nine years younger, I grew up in what used to be Surrey, and Bailey’s evocation of the minutiae of post-war life in the Home Counties gives me a not wholly pleasant feeling of being sucked back into my own childhood. Windfall ...”

“... his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far ...”

“... regretted that I failed in those laborious 473 pages to grasp Orwell’s character as well as Mr Peter Lewis did in his recent and sprightly picture book (which, incidentally, largely reflected Sonia’s view of the true George, though no reviewers noticed this). Perhaps so. I’m only irritated that Koestler failed to notice why I was so explicitly ...”

“... Emil DuBois-Reymond. As for making his living, he ultimately settled on psychiatry after reading in Krafft-Ebing’s textbook that it was a field where theory still bore the personal stamp of the author. Jung arrived at the Burghölzli hospital on 10 December 1900. Thus began what could have been the greatest psychiatric career of the 20th ...”

“... of the genre prohibit it, and accordingly he goes round in the eminently non-Beckettian circle of reading the work off from the life and the life off from the work. The game is not worth the candle; there is nothing in any way remarkable about its resuits, apart perhaps from their often flagrantly self-contradictory character: for example, Knowlson reminds us ...”

“... to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign Office in the Falklands had tried to do’. But unlike Pym, Walker kept his job, because she didn’t dare sack him. In some respects her role in the miners’ strike ...”

“... by a scholar leans towards ‘the Muse’ and away from the facts of History. There is a sense (as Peter Ackroyd cogently observed in his Life of Eliot) in which every literary biography is something of a tightrope-walk between these two poles: a sense in which, that is, all biographies are really re-interpretations on the part of each individual biographer of ...”