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“... There have been other general books, but Woodcock’s has been by far the most successful. Peter Marshall’s Demanding the impossible is a broad survey – an expensive hardback, efficiently written, similarly designed for ordinary readers but with plenty of notes to please scholars. Like Woodcock, ...”

“... something concrete. We use Hazlitt to advertise and illuminate other writers and artists. Peter Marshall does so in his new biography, William Godwin. Hazlitt’s vivid account of Godwin’s political importance appears on the first page of Marshall’s introduction, and his worthy book is studded ...”

“... Bryant, in 1987, though other problems intervened and the volume is only now brought to harbour by Peter Marshall, the pre-eminent authority on the late 18th-century British Empire, who took on the task in 2011. The lengthy wait allows Marshall to pay sad tribute to the general editor of the series, Paul Langford, who ...”

“... their language, distorted how they looked at the world and at themselves. Yet, as both Judd and Peter Marshall demonstrate, neither Parliament nor the public ever gave Empire much conscious and sustained attention except when things were going hideously wrong and/or when they themselves were directly involved. Thus there were English colonies in ...”

“... elude that soporific ‘and then’? So, it is little surprise to find the prolific genre-bender Peter Ackroyd beginning his brief biography of Edgar Allan Poe with a recounting of his subject’s final days. Never mind that Paul Strathern’s recent biographical study, Poe in 90 Minutes, and a new novel by Matthew Pearl, The ...”

“... android who makes cups of tea, learns ancient languages and models his diction and appearance on Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. A clip from that film, with the android devotedly watching it, is included for our information, and a little later the android, out of the spaceship and on the alien planet, rather smugly quotes his favourite lines: ‘There ...”

“... According to Knightley and Kennedy’s An Affair of State, the judge in the case, Mr Justice Marshall, was overheard in conversation with ‘a person very high up in the judiciary’, who asked: ‘Are you certain that you’ll be able to get him?’ Marshall replied: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get him on the immoral ...”

“... are doing here, along with such as Dugald Stewart, David Ricardo, the Mills, E.A. Freeman, Alfred Marshall and Graham Wallas. Are these the First Eleven, or just the first eleven names that cropped up? When the Whigs were in charge, at least we used to have an identifiable team of All Stars, whom the fans either loved or loved to hate. Don’t these chaps, in ...”

“... school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... demonstrations (backed by the use of a clandestine camera), he was prominent in the prosecution of Peter Hain for conspiracy, and was actually called as a prosecution witness, only to turn hostile at Pretoria’s bidding in order to preserve his cover. He began the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, which he leaked to the People before the 1974 election. No less ...”

“... might not have mattered so much – even in Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet there are some unbelievers, Peter Walker is an honourable example – but his style must have been insufferable. It is not only wickedly witty – better, perhaps, even than Galbraith. From a background of Eton, Balliol, the Guards and the Spectator it is the least some might expect (one ...”

“... provides an audio commentary. And there are lots of educational backups, some, like lectures by Peter Ackroyd and Tom Paulin, now over, others, including various conferences and courses, still to come. The most visible, and in some ways the most instructive of the exhibits are those which demonstrate Blake’s technical innovations. Only one of his ...”

“... and a ‘List of Major Works’. Frederick Karl offers up columns of elaborate notes. Marshall Walker supplies a ‘chronological table’ that correlates authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with ...”

“... Tale’ outlines the findings of the young – by Home Office pathologist standards – Dr Peter Acland, whose expert testimony (subsequently challenged by a more experienced Welsh pathologist) was somewhat undermined by an astonishing letter to the Times, in which he said: ‘I do not know who killed Miss Murrell, but I have the strong suspicion that ...”

“... and ‘democracy’ against Soviet totalitarianism. One of the rare dissenters, Charles Burton Marshall, is quoted here as saying that this bizarre operation to ‘counter Communism’ by trying ‘to break down ... doctrinaire thought patterns’ and anti-American attitudes throughout the world was ‘just about as totalitarian as one can get’. ...”