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“... in New York, attracting a disproportionate amount of financial support from a new breed of keen young collectors, with Charles Saatchi at the helm. These favoured artists are the so-called masters of Post-Modernism. If anyone tells you that there is no such thing as Post-Modernism, because there was never any such thing as Modernism, sit them down in ...”

“... or a ‘challenge’. Old age holds out promises as well as threats. Many are living to enjoy what Peter Laslett has termed the Third Age: a period of health, often lasting as long as childhood and adolescence together, free from the anxieties of child-care and the pressures of work. Out of such elders, remote from the stereotypes of decrepitude, may come a ...”

“... Lowell was 19, is to Ezra Pound. He describes himself as eccentric, subject to violent passions, keen to learn to be a poet – to ‘work under you and forge my way into reality’. Pound replied, and Lowell soon wrote again, reaffirming his intention to study with the poet, on whom depended such hope as we moderns have of rediscovering the great art of ...”

“... communities, attached to their traditional landmarks and rituals, and the Church’s hierarchy, keen to make a fresh start. Walsham admires the ‘energy and inventiveness of Catholic Christianity in the late medieval period’ and believes that by 1500 it had ‘all but displaced’ memories of ancient paganism. Even so, she stresses that the higher clergy ...”

“... clock crept round to eleven. ‘Shouldn’t have to do it,’ she would snap. ‘Too senior. Let Peter Metcalfe do it. Let Whatsi Willis do it, he can’t be thirty.’ When he came in my mother smelled alcohol on his breath. ‘Surely not risking your licence?’ She looked brittle. ‘It’s the atmosphere there at Minshull Street,’ he said. ‘It’s ...”

“... friend’ to a (male) correspondent as ‘just our kind of girl … bracing and witty and kind and keen on drink’, and by the end of the decade she was his constant companion. He always claimed to love them both, but it was Penelope, handful that she was, who suffered his loss both emotionally and financially. Elizabeth determinedly kept them apart and John ...”

“... two children by Wisdom; her remarriage to Gottfried Lessing and subsequent escape with their son, Peter, to England with the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing in her suitcase; and so on. But Klein is too baffled by Lessing and the choices she made, and usually too disapproving of them, to probe the connection between the life and the work. This is ...”

“... frivolity and public school backbone, was educated at Haileybury and Cambridge. As the critic John Peter has put it, ‘parts of the Criterion resembled a supplement to the Tablet – while, incomprehensibly, other parts were crowded with Marxists and moderns.’ Read was an anarchist who accepted a knighthood, a champion of avant-garde art who also edited the ...”

“... at all, the two young men were approvingly described by Fawcett as ‘strong as horses and keen as mustard’. One discerns the defiant – or fatal – note of amateurism. This was the team that set out to find the mysterious city of Z: three toffs from the English shires, a few native porters, some mules (for the early stages) and a pair of ...”

“... Ireland Secretary after a mass break-out of Republican prisoners from the Maze prison, and Peter Brooke failed in a more recent attempt to leave the same office after he had sung a song on a television chat show in the Republic of Ireland, hours after seven people had been killed in a particularly bad atrocity in the Province. While ministers have been ...”

“... a secular one, and represents nothing more than the religious yearning of a non-religious age. Peter Ackroyd’s dignified, often eloquent biography offers a picture of More which is a combination of Catholic admiration and scholarly determinism. Ackroyd has soaked himself in late medieval history; happily, he does not pretend to conduct a historical ...”

“... and whimsicalities into the author of ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ and ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’.Stevens met Elsie Viola Moll (née Kachel) in June 1904, during a visit to his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania. He had been living in New York since 1900, and had discovered the hard way that ‘the world holds an unoccupied niche ...”

“... to England. These incomers didn’t go on to develop much affection for their adopted country. Peter of Savoy bequeathed the huge estates he had acquired to his relatives back in Savoy and his palace on the Strand (where the Savoy Hotel now stands) to the prior of the hospice on the Grand St Bernard Pass. Matthew Paris lamented that ‘the English nobility ...”

“... a human link between the two adventurers, and rather more to the story. Another old Himalaya hand, Peter Steele, now tells it well, and puts right a longstanding injustice. Toiling up mountains for sport is, beyond any doubt, a British invention. People who live among mountains – the Sherpas of Nepal, for instance – can see no sense in it. Mountain ...”

“... for Queen Victoria, as far as Public Life is concerned’: yet by no means a solemn fellow, keen on sport and having an enduring love-affair with fast cars. (He wrote a piece on them later for Mademoiselle called ‘Go, Man, Go!’) Lowell regarded his opinions as a touchstone, and remained unoffended by Jarrell’s view that in the long poem ‘The ...”