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“... think I don’t need to. My first reading, before any reviews appeared, concurs with what I took Peter Ackroyd to be saying on Kaleidoscope, that the bulk of the narrative can be read and enjoyed in a moderately literal way as a mystery story set in London, even though the mystery turns out to be not soluble at this level. My second reading was helped by the ...”

“... I was so angry​ ,’ Peter Matthiessen said late in his life of his early days as a writer. ‘I was constantly in a contest … with my father.’ He’d grown up rich in Connecticut and New York, attended Yale, but found himself in ‘combat with the world’ for reasons he couldn’t understand; his early novels reflect this ...”

“... possess the fascination of a cryptic crossword in which one must sift fact from propaganda, post-Norman Conquest forgery from dimly glimpsed ancient original. At one pole, there is the sixth-century Welshman Gildas, whose gloomy rhetoric in De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae testifies to the survival of solid classical education after the Roman legions ...”

“... Conference. Major remains insistent that Back to Basics did not amount to a moral crusade. It was Peter Lilley and John Redwood, his hard-right opponents in the Conservative Party, who revisited the issues of single mothers and sexual continence. Nevertheless, Major admits in his autobiography that Back to Basics was devised as a challenge to entrenched ...”

“... by heap big novelists now facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least ...”

“... their passion and solace from charges of idiocy, rather than from the musicologically qualified: Peter Conrad’s A Song of Love and Death is a distinguished and often fascinating example of this phenomenon. Attempts to transform (or, in Conrad’s case, deconstruct) La Sonnambula or Les Pêcheurs de Perles into matter worthy of learned discourse also ...”

“... of homosexuality mockingly set down. How could Paul Bailey (still known then by his given name of Peter) admit to being what his family called a pansy, or an Oscar Wilde. ‘I was a Battersea pansy, wary of displaying his true colours in the sunlight,’ since it was well known to the Baileys and their friends that there were no pansies in a decent ...”

“... widely-hated Leeds United team of the early Seventies. Several of the players – Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter, Johnny Giles, Peter Lorimer, Alan ‘Sniffer’ Clarke – had a lot of ability, but they also tended to have Jekyll-and-Hyde natures, the Hyde component of which their manager, Don Revie, did nothing to ...”

“... Thus in his brilliant, stylish and still necessary ‘Master Musicians’ study of 1946, Norman Suckling could write: ‘The use made by Fauré of these ancient forms of musical speech consisted ... in a development of them along lines different from those followed in the course of musical history; he went back as it were to the fork of the roads and ...”

“... to the historian. In the 19th century, in the age which, in their different ways, Freud and Peter Gay have made their own, sheer bulk of documents may to some extent compensate for this difficulty. In the 17th century, the problem of psychological interpretation is altogether more intractable. That 17th-century characters had psychologies, as much as ...”

“... British polity. To celebrate the launching of the Institute of Contemporary British History, Peter Hennessy and Anthony Sheldon have edited an engaging collection of essays on post-war British governments, starting with Paul Addison on the wartime background to Attlee’s success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher ...”

“... this revisionist direction was taken in 1961 by the professional adviser to Magnusson’s series, Peter Sawyer. His The Age of the Vikings, one of the few recent studies not reissued this year, was a brilliant essay whose basic purpose was to explain the Viking explosion by arguing that there was nothing very exceptional about it. The Vikings were warrior ...”

“... No one talking about anything else. The Speaker gave a right bollocking to Kate Hoey and Norman Baker for allegedly colluding with our oppressors in the media. A good five minutes’ worth. I’ve never seen him so worked up. Actually, it was way over the top. Gave the impression he is rattled, which I imagine he is.  Then to a jam-packed meeting ...”

“... that Piano first worked closely with another influential figure, the brilliant Irish engineer Peter Rice of Ove Arup. In fact, after Piano and Rogers separated in 1978, Piano teamed with Rice, and, though they parted in 1981, Rice consulted for the office until his death in 1992. With such influences and interests Piano was in the thick of progressive ...”

“... correspondence: did Molyneux keep the letter out of fear, or pride? There can be no doubt why Peter George Patmore, father of the poet Coventry Patmore, kept the letters in which Hazlitt passionately poured out his rage and jealousy over Sara Walker, the daughter of his boarding-house keeper, ‘who leads a sporting life with everyone who comes in ...”