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“... When Put out More Flags was published in March 1942, Alan Pryce-Jones reviewed it in the New Statesman, praising the writer’s ‘dead-accurate’ social sense and his vituperative use of ‘the unpopular weapons of economy and proportion’, and yet concluding that the book and its author were ‘fundamentally without humour ...”

“... a half since he was around – generations earlier than other rock’n’roll deaths like Brian Jones or Janis Joplin. Greil Marcus does not seem to have met Uncle Vester. Indeed, on page 71 of his new book he admits that he has never even been inside Graceland. (‘There is a good deal in this book I cannot explain,’ he wisely concedes.) But he has come ...”

“... of a Blooming Fresh countenance that Officers have on leaving the Home Station,’ Lieutenant Peter Le Mesurier wrote to his sisters, ‘they return with a Tanny, Emaciated face, some wanting legs, others Arms & Eyes, &c, &c.’ In India, meanwhile, the slim chance of survival made marriage seem a distant dream. Some men had relationships with local ...”

“... antagonists who resemble one another: the devout Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein/IRA and the devout Peter Robinson, a Loyalist leader who has gained in clout since the programme. There will be those who think that the new Robinson is partly due to the fact that, in the programme that was eventually transmitted, the public was allowed to listen to Robinson’s ...”

“... there was the drinking. Bruce died in 1974. After an interval, his widow gave his papers to Nigel Jones, whose 1991 biography of Hamilton was followed two years later by a less substantial Life written by Sean French. Between them, these biographers raised their subject to his current position as the go-to guy for shabby-genteel, pub-dwelling pre-colour ...”

“... in line with other Marxist historians working in this field, like James Hinton and Gareth Stedman Jones, that revolutionary class-consciousness can grow out of a struggle for control of production itself. The Leninist model is thus discarded as a schematic imposition of ahistorical categories upon diverse and dynamic historical processes. Thus at the end of ...”

“... Beardsley told Smithers that the Peacock should ‘untiringly and unflinchingly attack the Burne-Jones and Morrisian medieval business’. Beardsley was committed to ‘usurpation’: he was determined to use the work of his elders and betters in his own manner, cleverly transporting it into a new and original style of his own – to outdo Morris at being ...”

“... a controversial journalist, taking a strong pro-British line against the pro-French. His pen-name, Peter Porcupine, was famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He became one of the tourist attractions of Philadelphia, remarks George Spater, who does well to tell us so much about the American years – this smart, satirical European journalist provoking the staid ...”

“... days of angst the deckchairs on the Titanic have been rearranged. Alistair Darling is staying put. Peter Mandelson will henceforth be known as ‘first secretary’, which effectively means deputy prime minister. Incredibly, he has found a way of making himself indispensable again, not that his considerable talents aren’t urgently needed. Alan Johnson ...”

“... even if there are occasional awkwardnesses of word order and clashes of register. (To say, of Peter the First’s interest in anatomical specimens, that the tsar ‘got chills’ looking at preserved human foetuses would be a terrible piece of phrasing even if it didn’t tap into a deep pop-cultural memory of John Travolta’s voice.) Ilinca ...”

“... Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In ...”

“... of this journal cannot be unaware, there appeared last year a controversial volume edited by Peter Widdowson called Re-Reading English, which faithfully applied Williams’s critique of academic English, and equally faithfully reproduced many of the shortcomings of his manner, including its open political bias and its embarrassing shortage of ...”

“... a 15-year-old, adds wire cheese-cutters and sharpened bicycle chains to the list. ‘In Essex,’ Peter Fleming says in Invasion 1940, ‘an unexpected windfall made possible the formation of a cutlass platoon, 24 strong, under the command of a former naval rating.’ He also tells how ‘four dozen rusty Lee Enfields, relics of some forgotten tableau or ...”

“... grown up around the Second World War, and even at the prime minister (although the groundwork for Peter Cook’s brutal takedown of Harold Macmillan had already been laid by The Goon Show’s Peter Sellers with his sketch ‘Party Political Speech’, which was released as the B-side of a single two years before Beyond the ...”

“... How great a diversity, Swift can hardly have imagined; it needed the researches of a William Jones or a Wilhelm von Humboldt to begin to persuade literary Europeans that they were not quite the masters of the speaking world. Now we know better – well, perhaps just a little. We know that something like four thousand languages are spoken in the world ...”