“... the prefaces and acknowledgments were ripped away; if you’d never watched American television or read the US papers; if all you had were the texts and you read them from cover to cover, would you know who Bob Woodward is? No, you wouldn’t, but if you read the jackets, acknowledgments ...”

“... to chart the history of secret policing. Their prize source is the former undercover officer Peter Francis, who spied on minor anti-fascist and anti-racist groups in North London in the early 1990s before infiltrating his target group, Anti-Fascist Action. While undercover, he lived alone in Highbury, drove a van and got a day job working in a school for ...”

“... of Russian power after 2000 that fuelled a series of ugly confrontations. In Who Lost Russia? Peter Conradi attempts a more balanced view, providing a brisk run-through of the post-Cold War era in which both Russia and the West are faulted for a string of misguided moves. A correspondent in Moscow from 1988 to 1995, and now foreign editor of the Sunday ...”

“... books. Here was a real English Sarmatian: a ferocious backwoods peer who boasted that he had only read one book in his life, who sometimes hunted his daughters with hounds, and who spoke for all Sarmatians when he said: ‘Abroad is unutterably bloody, and foreigners are fiends!’ Poland, in the period that interests Butterwick, contained three-quarters of a ...”

“... he gives us this short paragraph about Viri’s general state of being: His friends were Arnaud, Peter, Larry Vern. All friends are friends in a different way. Arnaud was his closest friend; Peter, his oldest. But what comes next is this: He lingered before the counter, his eye passing over coloured bolts of ...”

“... of sorts. How did Tynan become such a cool dead daddy? True, he remains a pleasure to read: his float-like-a-butterfly, sting-like-a-bee style has lost none of its panache, his witty concision is still quotable (on Gielgud in modern dress: ‘The general aspect of a tight, smart, walking umbrella’), much of his excitement outliving the occasions ...”

“... he cried, almost at the same moment as my father called back ‘Hullo Sig.’I had not yet read Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man or I might have been reminded of the narrator describing how as a boy on his second day out hunting he sees a fox run across his path; someone ‘holloa’s and before he can stop himself he exclaims: ‘Don’t do that, they’ll ...”

“... was less likely than his contemporaries to be seen in his full complexity and thereby reassessed. Peter Stanford, prompted and supported by Day-Lewis’s widow, the actress Jill Balcon, has now undertaken the work of recovery, and he makes clear that he believes this biography should provide the occasion for a major reassessment of his subject’s standing as ...”

“... Minutes, ITV’s World in Action or the BBC’s Panorama. At the weekend, you might settle in to read one of America’s news magazines, Time or Newsweek, or one of the Sunday papers: Britain’s Observer or Mail on Sunday or the immense Sunday edition of the New York Times (its biggest ever number, on 14 September 1987, had 1612 pages and weighed 12 ...”

“... dealing with the way capitalism crushes the bodies and souls of workers. When Hannah Arendt read it in the 1950s, she thought it was the best thing ever written on the subject.In August 1936, Weil crossed the Spanish border and made her way to Barcelona. There she managed to join a group of international volunteers in the small town of Pina de ...”

“... preparing to mark the centenary of The Waste Land’s publication. When Christopher Ricks reviewed Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot in the LRB (1 November 1984; the same year Michael Hastings’s play about Eliot’s first marriage was staged), he remarked: ‘Plainly it is the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in on.’ In 2022, with the ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I persevered, and even persuaded my history teacher to allow me to do an extended A-Level essay on Wordsworth’s political beliefs. I chugged ...”

“... A piece of bloodied newspaper was found at the scene – the Morning Star. Yet Mr Kent read only the Times, the Frome Times and the Civil Service Gazette. Did this mean anything? Another clue was the household laundry book, with which the police became fixated. The Road Hill case was dense with fabric. The setting of the murder happened to be ...”

“... islet is crammed with men: Chief Vorstenbosch, Deputy Melchior van Cleef, Dr Marinus, Senior Clerk Peter Fischer, Junior Clerk Ponke Ouwehand, Arie Grote, Piet Baert, Ivo Oost, Wybo Gerritszoon. Their conversation is as cacophonous as their names. For instance: ‘most of us hands gather of an evenin’ in my humble billet, eh, for a little hazard ...”