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“... post-feminist or anti-feminist film, or just in some baffling way French. In the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a ‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really struck me was that every woman I knew who had ...”

“... or duller than we have been led to suppose, or had wasted his time in Washington. If you look up Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, though, you will find a record of some affable chinwags with Berlin, tending to confirm Auden and MacNeice’s award, in Letters from Iceland, of a ‘dish of milk’ to the feline Isaiah. And some other living cloak-and-gown experts ...”

“... which could be nice; Margaret Drabble’s faced the street, but with curtains so long and John Lewis-like I’d be frightened they’d get into the prose; Edna O’Brien’s had some relics of Samuel Beckett, hardly likely to unchain the imagination or get the words flowing. All have had awful fireplaces. Can we see where you work? No fear. 11 ...”

“... trumpet above the chancel arch, the dead rising from their tombs in their shrouds; on the left St Peter welcomed the saved into what seemed a rather overcrowded heavenly city; on the right crowned and mitred souls were being dragged in chains to the mouth of hell. On the south wall the archangel Gabriel was weighing a soul in a huge pair of scales; a devil ...”

“... family friend in a drug deal, he employs as his partner a former schoolfriend, Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), from whom he had drifted apart after Johnny joined a gang of skinhead racists. While they busy themselves disavowing their cultural obligations and falling in love, all around them is chaos – Omar’s uncle’s mistress is poisoned by his ...”

“... at Williams’s feet in the early Sixties, there is Terry Eagleton, ‘as allusively charming as Peter Wimsey’; at New Left Review, when it was embarking on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the ...”

“... his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost circle of the school’. However, as Peter Campbell wrote in the LRB (3 February 2011), English painters ‘responded to Impressionism’s escape from the academic into the everyday, but made something tighter and darker of it. The French pleasure in picnics and river parties and weather wasn’t ...”

“... on paper’, as she told Prouty, under the influence of, in turn, Edna St Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Roethke, Virginia Woolf and Stephen Vincent Bénet.When her friend Ann Davidow left Smith after one term, Plath’s first letter to her, written through tears, told her that although she’d come third in the nationwide Seventeen short story ...”

“... Cockney songs, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘bits of Welsh stuff … Norse sagas … and Lewis Carroll and Lear and God!’ And Eliot. He listened closely to the allusive mimicry of The Waste Land before setting out to do the war in different voices. It seems clear that he also absorbed the ensemble scoring of Sweeney Agonistes – its velocity and ...”

“... Portrait of Innocent X. The reviews managed to express both revulsion and excitement, and Wyndham Lewis made serious claims:Of the younger painters, none actually paints so beautifully as Francis Bacon … I must not attempt to describe these amazing pictures – the shouting creatures in glass cases, these dissolving ganglia the size of a small fist in which ...”

“... profit from the pain of those seeking answers about what happened to their loved ones,’ Brandon Lewis, then Northern Ireland secretary, wrote as he shepherded the bill through Parliament. ‘This feeds a pernicious and distorted view of the past, promoted and peddled by those with a vested interest in presenting the British state as the aggressor … We ...”

“... This produced such aperçus from Johnson as – in response to an anti-lockdown article by Peter ‘Bonkers’ Hitchens – ‘My heart is with Bonkers. I don’t believe in any of this, it’s all bullshit. I wish I’d been the mayor in Jaws and kept the beaches open.’ And – in response to data showing that the median age of people dying of Covid ...”

“... of the Rt Hon the Earl of Woolton.Cassell, 452 pp., 1959Eating: What We Eat and Why It Matters by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.Arrow, 400 pp., £7.99, September 2006, 978 0 09 950402 3Food Futures: Rethinking UK Strategy by Susan Ambler-Edwards, Kate Bailey, Alexandra Kiff, Tim Lang, Robert Lee, Terry Marsden, David Simons and Hardin Tibbs.Chatham House, 50 ...”

“... on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true vocation and chief talent, and he worked at it tirelessly. The great majority of his numerous poems – he described them, without false modesty, as ...”

“... of Hobsbawm in its own records, which were housed in the Registry, described by the MI5 veteran Peter Wright as ‘a mass of dry paper’ inside which ‘were warm trails waiting to be followed’. This repository, containing an estimated 500,000 files by the mid-1950s, was organised according to an elaborate system of cross-referencing between Personal ...”