“... Twenties he had been especially impressed by the American band of Ted (‘Is everybody happy?’) Lewis, as well as by the famous British band led by Jack Hylton – light, happy, swinging big-band jazz, now given a Russian accent. The idea of The Happy Guys had originally come from Boris Shumiatsky, then deputy president of the State Committee on Art ...”

“... It was​ in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950 ...”

“... from The Shepherd’s Calendar largely as they first appeared in Blackwood’s. In A Queer Book Peter Garside has chosen to use Hogg’s manuscripts as his copy-text, where these seem to offer something like a final version. On occasion, however, he produces composite texts put together from more than one manuscript, or from a manuscript combined with a ...”

“... careers of pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently ...”

“... insistently before our eyes and on our skin. Behind the poem, unobtrusive as it is, lie Janet Lewis’s sixty years of devotion to artistic economy, in prose narrative rather more than in verse. But on the other hand all the more compelling testimonies seem to agree that such deliberate severity is indeed the characteristic mode in which the ...”

“... up in the whirl of events and day-to-day politicking. Some historians, following the lead of Lewis Namier, who saw political ideas largely as a rhetorical smokescreen for the advancement of interests, have treated Burke as a mere placeman and hack – albeit one with wit, cerebral depth and a marvellous turn of phrase. But reductionism of this sort ...”

“... Nat Nakasa threw himself to his death. The names were spoken with reverence in the Drum office: Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Arthur Maimane, and the photographers Bob Gosani and Peter Magubane, Winnie Mandela’s friend, now in New York; Can Themba, whose home in Sophiatown was known as ‘The House of Truth’; Casey ...”

“... of plagiarism and not only in relation to Moore. Seeing Hepworth’s Winged Figure, on the John Lewis building in Oxford Street, Naum Gabo is supposed to have shouted: ‘That’s mine!’ Hepworth herself, highly conscious of competing in the most masculine of art forms, attributed criticism of her work to male prejudice. It was, undoubtedly, a ...”

“... also raises a question about Cooper’s overall insistence that (contrary to the belief of C.S. Lewis) romance heroines – and heroes too, for that matter – are chaste, their desires immovably fixed on the person they love. Within marriage, accusations of a woman’s adultery, Cooper insists, are almost invariably false, at least in the English ...”

“... as to be delusional, were it not for the astute judgment Christ shows about everyone else. C.S. Lewis adapted this argument into the ‘mad, bad or God?’ challenge to neutral readers in Mere Christianity. But the effect in Chesterton is again to divorce Christ from his Judaism. Eyewitness reportage gives Chesterton no scope for noting the typological ...”

“... and learned to draw, and through another of the floating population at his parents’ home met Peter Watson. In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender of Horizon, Craxton found a friend, an indulgent patron and a way into the avant-garde. He had a narrow brush with conscription, from which ...”

“... for short – within walking distance of Notting Hill. In the 1950s, the area was the domain of Peter Rachman, the Polish-born refugee turned slum landlord who exploited the hostility of the housing market towards Black immigrants, buying up run-down houses in Paddington and North Kensington and renting them to desperate people at extortionate ...”

“... This book begins with real passion as Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw lash into those historians who they believe have made unwarranted assumptions about the links between Britain and South Africa: to wit, that Britain fought the Boer War to get its hands on the gold and that economic considerations remained the motivating force in its difficult relationship with South Africa thereafter ...”

“... of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity.’ Nancy Mitford, although persuaded by her husband, Peter Rodd, to don a black shirt and gush in print on behalf of TPOF (The Poor Old Führer), was already marshalling the Union Jack Shirts for her novel Wigs on the Green. But it was not until 1938 that P.G. Wodehouse brought on Sir Roderick Spode and his Black ...”

“... of public betterment’ and guided by ‘valiant ideas of freedom and democracy’. The journalist Peter Apps credits it with preventing the end of the world and allowing ‘whole generations’ to ‘grow up largely in peace’. In its own promotional material Nato claims to have ‘kept over one billion people safe for 75 years’. It has suddenly become ...”