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“... journalists, many of whom are women nowadays, are quite as likely to ask for a Perrier water or a white wine and soda as to order a large scotch or a pint of bitter. In some respects, this is no less important a change in the ambience of our trade than the new technology and the mass migration from Fleet Street. Moreover, the combination of these factors has ...”

“... translation by S.G. Middlemore, without most of the original notes but with an introduction by Peter Burke). In this view the individualism of ‘Renaissance Man’ distinguished him from ‘Medieval Man’, who ‘was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation’. Yet altarpieces spell out clearly that such ...”

“... sunshine and enter the Baptistery, a compact octagonal church with oblong-patterned, black-and-white façades like an enormous liquorice allsort. Our heads tilt upwards and we stare at the swarming life of the eight mosaic panels in the cupola, a hundred feet above us. Through my binoculars I can make out a colossal devil sitting in a cleft rock. He is ...”

“... eggs, others preferred to call them poached. Either way, any attempt to describe the appearance of Peter Lorre must deal with those eyes. What teeth are to Julia Roberts and lips to Angelina Jolie, his bulging eyes were to Peter Lorre, his unavoidable calling card and a feature quite out of proportion with the norm. He ...”

“... and to perform them as well as the big stars in St Louis and Chicago. For the small group of urban white blues fans that grew into a huge audience that remains largely urban and white, he was a bridge in the other direction, taking us from our world into the ‘deep blues’ of the older Delta players. In both cases he ...”

“... kind can be loved and can make you happy. But then Thorson, standing on stage as the driver of the white Rolls-Royce that is also part of the act, and practically a pampered prisoner the rest of the time, can’t enjoy any of this in the way Liberace enjoys his celebrity, long, trailing white fur coat and his own jokes. The ...”

“... dedicated to Milgram: empowerment … taking responsibility), as well as being the source for a Peter Gabriel song entitled ‘We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)’. A French punk rock group called Milgram put out a CD called Vierhundertfünfzig Volt (‘450 Volts’). A British band called Midget issued The Milgram Experiment. Plays have been written ...”

“... bowl a long-hop.’ Denis Compton said: ‘He is a yobbo, who was never as good as he thinks.’ Peter May and his selectors refused even to pick Botham for England after the ban had expired. Was all this really because the game had been ‘brought into disrepute’ through Botham’s article on cannabis? Cannabis is illegal, but it is not dangerous, as far ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel is partly a narrative, partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors. It is an important and a depressing book, its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel ...”

“... later did I attain the standards of Maugham and Orwell.Changing bathing habits figure largely in Peter Ward’s The Clean Body. A Canadian professor, he includes North America as well as Western Europe in his survey of the development of personal hygiene in modern times. He begins by emphasising that in the 17th century, at the beginning of the ...”

“... off her stays by the water’s edge and never wore them again’, and was remembered in flowing white robes by a girl from Glasgow: ‘the first grown-up I had ever seen wearing bare feet and sandals.’ The marriage was, eventually, consummated, and the first of four daughters was born in 1911. The family and her own work began to take up more and more of ...”

“... later appeared in several Fassbinder movies, is German; second, Powell can’t stop thinking of Peter Lorre. The effect is not subtle but it is compelling. Böhm doesn’t look anything like Lorre – he looks like a nicely brought up, slightly spoiled male model – but he keeps pulling these wonderfully eerie faces, staring off sideways, rolling his ...”

“... closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens. Peter Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and diver who has been studying octopuses and other cephalopods in the wild, mostly off the coast of his native Sydney, for years. The alienness of octopuses, in his view, provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of ...”

“... idea of a Hitler cult among women. Jill Stephenson, writing in the collection of essays edited by Peter Stachura, disposes effectively of what one recent writer has called ‘the sacrificial willingness of women to be Hitler’s devotees’. The complex and changing position of women in the Third Reich admits of no such conclusion, while it is certain that ...”

“... Peter Porter’s imagination tends towards the epigram, but not quite in the popular sense which suggests brief, pithy encapsulations of wit or wisdom: Believe me, Flaccus, the epigram is more than just a cracker-motto or an inch of frivolous joking to fill up a column. When, in 1972, he published the selection of translations called After Martial, he tended to avoid ‘the two-line squibs ...”