“... unfortunate and now long-dead woman, from whose name HeLa is derived.* So why do we age? In 1952, Peter Medawar pointed out that until the middle of the 18th century most of our ancestors would have died from infections or injuries long before they were old enough to experience the effects of ageing. Genes that produced harmful effects late in life would ...”

“... which his father had once shown him; here the circle was complete.’ A sceptic might ask how Peter Ackroyd knows that Dickens’s face bore an infantile look in death? No one there seems to have recorded the fact. Was Ackroyd, like Scrooge, transported to the room by the spirit of biography past? How does Ackroyd know that Dickens’s final mental state ...”

“... the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly ...”

“... with him. The story goes that Schoenberg dismissed him, telling him he lacked an ear for harmony. Peter Yates’s book Twentieth-Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound (1968), reported Schoenberg as saying that Cage was ‘not a composer – but an inventor of genius’, a back-handed compliment that stuck ...”

“... a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of kindness as much as weariness. The killing of Drollet, the imprisonment of Christian and Cheyenne’s subsequent suicide left Brando a ...”

“... a dozen Stevens texts pre-dating the Pisan Cantos and Paterson, while excluding Pound and Williams, the book seems more atavistic than Contemporary, and slanted into bias. Nothing in the objectivist or projective line is included. Olson is rejected, along with Dorn. A tradition of strong poetry, leading back through Stevens to Coleridge, Keats and ...”

“... turn of Joan Littlewood at Stratford East and George Devine at the Royal Court. In recent years, Peter Brook has taken up the baton in Stratford and in Paris. All of them demonstrated, implicitly or explicitly, that the theatre is an art, a forum, a faith, something to be fought for. At the Royal Court George Devine instilled a system of values that gave the ...”

“... no ordinary, daily life going on. Beaton languished for four years after the wealthy art patron Peter Watson, who was kind enough to him but emotionally committed to Beaton’s rival, Oliver Messel. For a while Stephen Tennant looked like a possibility, but no one fell in love with Beaton, though he hankered and ached. When he turned his attentions to ...”

“... proudly describing himself as a member of the Kitchen Cabinet, along with Gerald Kaufman, Marcia Williams, Thomas Balogh and Peter Shore. Leaders, however, have difficulty in maintaining the unqualified devotion even of their closest followers. It is interesting to see that there were rumbles of discontent as early as June ...”

“... He was a great-grandson on his mother’s side of an African slave who had become a protégé of Peter the Great. He inherited several African characteristics, such as hair, features and skin colour, and this seemed to annoy his mother, though perhaps no more than everything else about him. He himself was, or appeared to be, proud of his African ...”

“... impeccably of the Left, but by no means all are intellectuals. There is not only Professor Raymond Williams but Bernard Dix of NUPE and Jack Adams, Convenor at BL, Longbridge; not only Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, but Peter Carter, UCATT regional organiser; not only Royden Harrison, professor of social history at ...”

“... the vulgarisation of Christianity, is a barn-door that has been riddled repeatedly by the likes of Peter Simple. The influence of Evelyn Waugh – the Waugh of Decline and Fall – is so marked as to be oppressive. The characters are facetiously named – Father Sporran, the Dundee of Caik, Professor Hairbrush (a philosopher – get it?). Since satire invites ...”

“... resignation. A scattering of dissident voices on the payroll – Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, Zoe Williams, George Monbiot – were drowned out by a host of detractors, from within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan ...”

“... To die thus at just the right moment depends, in life, not on narrative logic but on what Bernard Williams calls ‘moral luck’. It is what enables a person to die when full of days, old but not in terminal misery, correctly mourned by a numerous and prosperous family. It is not an ending one can choose, it is a matter of aesthetics. For instruction in the ...”

“... won ten pennants and nine World Series. His big rival as a hitter was Boston’s scientific Ted Williams, who hit .406 in DiMaggio’s Streak season, the last person to hit .400 in a season. ‘Sure he can hit,’ Joe said. ‘But he never won a thing.’ The Streak, the marriage to Monroe, the reference in the Simon and Garfunkel song (‘Where have you ...”