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“... places away from her job and family and ordinary life. She is not unhappy with marriage, or France in the l980s, but she wouldn’t want them for eternity. One of the most poignant and ambiguously beautiful moments in the novel records Agnes’s death, a compound of horror, waste and a kind of grace. Agnes has been fatally injured in a car crash (caused ...”

“... a series of reprints – The Fourteen-Eighteen collection – edited by an antiquarian bookseller, Peter T. Scott. Adams was a product of Malvern and Cambridge, and a lieutenant in the same battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers as Sassoon and Graves. His title is ironic: ‘nothing of importance’ was the official description of an ordinary day of trench ...”

“... of enjoyment and sexuality evident in the church art of so many other countries, in Spain and France and Britain, and in the Buddhist East where I once saw a wayside shrine in the hills east of Kandy which imaged the afterlife as a thorn-tree up which sinners climbed for so many thousand years (the rates per sin were displayed in a cave temple ...”

“... Renaissance interest in the occult. One of the outstanding papers at this conference was that of Peter Burke, who may stand here as a representative of a much wider group of historians now increasingly concerned with the recovery of popular culture. That group is disparate, its motives no less so. The concept of sections of society ‘hidden from ...”

“... that rural nostalgia has been the fuel of British economic decline. One of the many merits of Peter Mandler’s superb study is that it utterly demolishes these assumptions. He shows that, by Continental standards, Britain has been exceptionally slow to protect its country houses. Political intervention has been resisted and commercial development put ...”

“... Museum of Ireland’s permanent display in Dublin, in the pages of many books and articles. (Peter Adam’s Eileen Gray: Her Life and Work, revised in 2009, remains the best introduction.) But despite the photographs and exhibitions and the commercial as well as scholarly rediscovery of her work in recent decades, I cannot quite shake the suspicion that ...”

“... professor’ the modern successor of ‘a Siberian shaman’, a ‘new kind of messiah’. Peter Atkins, a university chemist and science populariser, judges rather that Mendeleev resembled ‘the mad monk Rasputin and had a reputation to match’. In an autobiographical passage entitled ‘Mendeleev’s Garden’, Oliver Sacks recalls the photograph ...”

“... one South African were taken to hospital. ‘Rugby is a contact sport,’ the South Africa coach, Peter de Villiers, said. ‘So is dancing … Do we really respect the game? If not, why not go to the nearest ballet shop, buy a tutu and enjoy it?’‘You  don’t want to take anything away from rugby’s sheer gladiatorial nature,’ Damian Hopley, a ...”

“... 1918 that was too small for the open sea, and would not change his policy even after the fall of France. In late 1943, when the battle of the Atlantic was already lost, Germany finally adopted a modern long-range U-boat design, the Type XXI, but its construction fell into the hands of Albert Speer, who transformed it into another of his political-industrial ...”

“... true that some modern art has imitated the primitive energy, the folk spells, of graffiti. Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters, a quarterly ‘journal of the fine arts’, launched last spring, challenges many of the fashionable practices and assumptions which I have just reviewed. At first, its opponents in the art world said it wouldn’t last, then ...”

“... this group of studies lies an important earlier collection, the work published in 1972, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, as Household and Family in Past Time. This book established the remarkable constancy of average household size in England since the 16th century, despite people’s mobility, with a norm of a little under five persons until the low ...”

“... that it was too radical to be very funny, claims ‘it was undoubtedly a strong influence on Peter Cook (one of the original cast members)’, implying, I think, that in Beyond the Fringe, staged the following year, Peter was pushed in the general direction of satirical comedy. I don’t think this was quite the ...”

“... what you found at the bottom of a Martini glass, but then he bought a ramshackle farm in southern France and discovered they were what he had at the bottom of his garden, two hundred trees, already old in the time of Louis XIV, but now in a dreadful state. He decided to do a little research, which took him first to the local olive mills and then all around ...”

“... rival, Catholic claimants to the British throne backed by the other main European naval powers, France and Spain. Even in the 1780s, Britain was engaged in a frantic naval race against these two countries, which France might have won. European imperatives, and persistent and legitimate fears that the Catholic powers would ...”

“... Jardine who masterminded the notorious ‘bodyline’ tactics of Larwood and Voce; as captain, Peter May too was criticised for short-pitched bowling, time-wasting and nullifying the immortal Sonny Ramadhin’s fiendish spin by simply kicking the ball away down the leg side.It was axiomatic that only the upper-class amateur possessed the leadership ...”