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“... written archives must by now fall open at the right places, marked perhaps by a spent match Peter Black inserted in 1971 or a shrivelled potato chip left behind by Asa Briggs. As for the one or two specific issues Scannell and Cardiff are able to enlarge upon, notably the treatment of unemployment and poverty, they have done so by venturing beyond the ...”

“... of genuine letters written by Paul of Tarsus, they call themselves Paul when they are not Paul, Peter when they are not Peter, James when they are not James, Jude when they are not Jude. Sometimes they put in circumstantial detail to make their claims more plausible: so pseudo-Paul tells his gullible readers ...”

“... about him, supposing that he was travelling or busy with the estate.‘Petersburg is the front hall, Moscow is the maids’ quarters, but the country is our study,’ says another ex-officer, retiring from the tedious excitement of the capital to his country estate, in the prose fragment ‘A Novel in Letters’. ‘A decent man passes of necessity through ...”

“... at the nerveless middle classes who won’t fight the money economy are written in a jerky music-hall verse which sounds like Kipling, allowing for a few skips of the metrical needle: It’s either you fight or you die young gents, you’ve got no option. No good asking the reason why it’s either you fight or you die die, die, lily-liveredly die or fight ...”

“... much wood out of the wood   it takes no more than a dropped shoe   or a cleared throat on the hall landing     to set its little blue moan off again. A real-life version of Wallace Stevens’s blue guitar of art, the reverberation within this fabulously taut instrument also ‘becomes the place of things as they are’. Like the poet, the guitar ...”

“... Another recent biography of a leading modern artist was composed under similar restrictions. Peter Ackroyd says he was ‘forbidden by the Eliot estate to quote from Eliot’s published work, except for purposes of fair comment in a critical context, or to quote from Eliot’s unpublished work or correspondence’. As it happens, the two subjects, while ...”

“... out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger-man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.When Manchette began ...”

“... into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the planet? Jackson’s mother, Katherine, a Jehovah’s Witness, has said that ...”

“... selling tickets for a benefit concert which starred the cast of Beyond the Fringe. At the gig, Peter Cook performed his Harold Macmillan routine, comparing the four-minute warning before a nuclear strike to Roger Bannister’s mile record (‘I’d like you to know that in this great country of ours a man can run a mile in four minutes’). In August I ...”

“... pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career as a police informer. Mokaba has become so prominent that it would be embarrassing for the ANC leadership to admit to this, so we suddenly found him cropping up at Mandela’s side to welcome ...”

“... I’d become a convert at the age of 16 when I attended a rally in London: it was in Central Hall, Westminster, and was led by a man called John Wimber, a big, serious man with a neatly trimmed beard who specialised in what he called the ‘ministry of signs and wonders’. Wimber had been the founder of a Christian community called the Vineyard ...”

“... up on me. Mr Knocker put me down for a hairdresser and a Protestant. But there was always my Uncle Peter, a die-hard Celtic supporter – not like my brothers, but a real Celtic supporter, the sort who thought Rangers fans should be sent to Australia on coffin ships, or made to work the North Sea oilrigs for no pay – and Uncle ...”

“... In fact, many cinemagoers avoided or actively resisted German blandishments. Until Pearl Harbor, Peter Demetz remembers in his occupation memoir, Prague in Danger, cinemas in the city played American musicals, including the Broadway Melody series, to ‘packed houses’ that included the city’s many jazz-obsessed swing kids. In a novel set during the ...”

“... for example, hidden behind the screen in The School for Scandal while two elderly knights as Sir Peter Teazle and Joseph Surface crawled with maddening deliberation and pointless pauses through their scene. Suddenly losing patience, she boomed aloud for all to hear: ‘Oh, do get a move on, you silly old pongers!’ Or the one about John Barrymore as Richard ...”

“... Something had happened recently to confirm this in Bill’s mind. At school two years previously, Peter Kearney – a short, pinched boy with hair on his upper lip and eyebrows like soot smudges – had begun to taunt him, at first only about small things, but subsequently about things more serious, like the quality of his handwriting and the answers he gave ...”