“... and flat, Vulcan-like affect, usually tops the list. Last year, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel told an audience that in the current economy people ‘who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage’ because they’re more likely to fall prey to caution, complacency and the conventional wisdom of the crowd. It​ isn’t ...”

“... streets of the capital and triggered the violence of the June Days.The Düsseldorf artist Johann Peter Hasenclever captured such a moment in Workers before the City Council. Painted in 1849 and widely exhibited in a number of versions, it shows a delegation of labourers whose work-creation scheme – excavation work on the various arms of the Rhine – had ...”

“... or sociological underpinnings. The approach has also been taken up by non-psychologists like Peter Singer and Cass Sunstein. Like Hume, it ascribes to deontological rules some form of social utility, but it is often disposed to find that utility more pronounced in the past, when our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in small groups and evolutionary forces ...”

“... from a head-hunting trip to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of undisguised envy and covetousness amongst themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on Widener’s optimistically ...”

“... Scepticism are obvious from the opening pages of Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, Sir Peter Strawson’s urbane, elegant, and, alas, short new book: ‘The Sceptic is, strictly, not one who denies the validity of certain types of belief, but one who questions, if only initially and for methodological reasons, the adequacy of our grounds for ...”

“... nine-to-five wage-slave grind found its most vivid street-level expression in avid consumerism. As Peter Gay put it, paraphrasing Walter Gropius: ‘The cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind, of modernity.’ This could be Mod speaking. Gay’s reflection is from his 1968 book Weimar Culture, and its subtitle is also applicable here: The ...”

“... Empson’s summer absence at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up Empson’s spare and insufficiently dramatic verse with ‘alchemical mumbo-jumbo’; the composer Gilbert Kennedy ensured the ...”

“... interest, the fact is that they seldom, if ever, reach a conclusion about it. As Nye points out, Peter Trubowitz’s exhaustive study of the way Americans defined the national interest throughout the 20th century concluded that ‘there is no single national interest. Analysts who assume that America has a discernible national interest whose defence should ...”

“... abstraction. It slots him into a ‘cookie-cutter modernist narrative of marching styles’, as Peter Schjeldahl put it. But the appearance of relentless progress in Mondrian’s art sometimes disguised uncertain forward leaps and backtrackings, like the careful deletions and proof marks he made on the letters he wrote in English. His reinventions involved ...”

“... can be to point out, there is nothing organically wrong.) But there is plenty to cherish in just reading the words, even if you have to fill in the timing and the facial movements as best you can. Sandy’s slowness of speech could be the fastidiousness of the connoisseur. He fondles words like a philologist. A polysyllable is a joy to him, and with ...”

“... fictional device, a point of view. She appends a small anthology of the poems, well translated by Peter Norman, that she deems necessary for an understanding of her narrative. Anatoly Nayman, a poet and playwright, was, along with Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry Bobyshev, one of a group of young writers whom Akhmatova made her spiritual children. He met her in 1959 ...”

“... to be more Republican or more dispassionately liberal. But he is wary of the charge (reiterated by Peter Porter in his sharp Sunday Telegraph review of Opened Ground) of ‘fetishising ... the local’, and cautious about the indigenous traditions of Irish nationalism, given the evidence that ‘pride in the ethnic and religious heritage can quickly degrade ...”

“... that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating “oeuvre” is unavoidable,’ he told Peter McDonald in an interview, ‘but the very word sounds so pompous – you know, those people who talk about “my work”.’ Still, for all Longley’s likeable unpretentiousness, an oeuvre, with the sustained imaginative integrity that implies, is ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... by shouts from his bedroom to make him a cup of tea; she was free to immerse herself in reading the great Russian novels and writing a book of her own, a series of sardonic brief lives of her husband’s brothers and their spouses. She had as many visitors and invitations as she could wish, because she was immensely popular – and with people of ...”