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“... itself as one of the pieties of Crusading historiography long before the veteran Python, Terry Jones, delivered his adverse verdict on television. Even novelists like Scott, Henty and Rider Haggard have been inclined to take a remarkably severe view of the Crusading enterprise. It is hardly surprising that modern Arab historians, besides condemning the ...”

“... some to friends, including Monckton Milnes, Richard Burton and D.G. Rossetti. Ruskin and Burne-Jones discovered it; Meredith was bowled over by it. By the century’s end it had already gone through hundreds of editions. In his ABC of Reading Ezra Pound proposed the critical exercise: try to find out why the Rubaiyat has been so successful. Not so ...”

“... and crystals, beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a ...”

“... wounds?/Goodbye to all that.’ Other unmetrical versions include a translation for the stage by Peter Meineck (1998) and many more free verse or prose versions (by Christopher Collard, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Peter Burian, E.D.A. Morshead and others). Sarah Ruden’s Oresteia ...”

“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... at all except as a figment of one man’s amour fou. The exception is the Hazlitt scholar Stanley Jones. In the late 1960s he succeeded in tracing a direct descendant of Sarah’s younger brother, Micaiah Walker. He pursued certain trails this opened up for him, and published his findings about her and her family in his biography, William Hazlitt: A Life ...”

“... regiment or publisher, or who (having slavered with the best of them over the early flowering of Jones minor) is now a sleek and rotund editor of something like the Times or the Spectator. Peregrine Worsthorne, in this rather idle but charming book,* strives to come across as a sort of Catholic version of Gray. His father was a member of that Belgian ruling ...”

“... Mike Figgis, who has made three feature movies in Hollywood: Internal Affairs, Liebestraum and Mr Jones, respectively a successful police thriller, a quirky psychological drama and a character study of a manic-depressive. It is a stretch to imagine him pitching his new movie, Leaving Las Vegas, in similar circumstances. Leaving Las Vegas is about a failed ...”

“... lines distributed among ten stanzas – the sort of poetry mathematics of which Peter Reading, an admirer of Armitage’s work, is master), but altogether another to write 1000 lines to a year-end deadline, not least when attempting an essentially public poem which reflects on our times and recollects some recent headline-grabbing ...”

“... Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally perverse. In some respects, moreover, their book belongs ...”

“... few meagre inches of pious editorial. Writing in the Guardian three days after the story broke, Peter Jenkins talked of ‘the practical question of what should be done about the Fleet Street heavy mob bivouacking in Hertfordshire and Wiltshire, the Prime Minister pursued wherever she goes not by lobby correspondents but by crime ...”

“... Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon made Bogart a star, although the refugee Peter Lorre provides the film’s only moment of genuine fright Wilder, the German refugee screenwriter, and Chandler, the Hammett heir, brought the two figures, investigated and investigator, together in Double Indemnity. Taking the point of view of Fred ...”

“... veto has in fact been a headache for the World Service, most recently stopping its director, Peter Horrocks, from closing as many language services as he originally proposed as a way of managing the cuts. Such tensions are not new. ‘We would have extended our broadcasts in a number of ways to different languages,’ recalls John Tusa, who ran the World ...”

“... allowed to marry in the South of France, with both mothers in attendance. The early sections of Peter Sussman’s Decca, a vast collection of Mitford’s letters, cover this period. For those who take pleasure in the ironies of epistolary communication (or non-communication), there are some gems here. One is the clever forgery, written by Mitford and ...”

“... to acknowledge as indispensable two particular books about Caravaggio (by Andrew Graham-Dixon and Peter Robb) from which he has drawn an enormous amount.Sudden Death is full of asides: ‘As I write, I don’t know what this book is about. It’s not exactly about a tennis match … Maybe it’s just a book about how to write this book; maybe that’s what ...”