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“... Paris figures in the titles of both James Campbell’s and Peter Lennon’s books, but this is a restricted, specialised Paris. Campbell takes us into something called the ‘Interzone’ (the term is odd, and troublesome), inhabited by assorted exiles, misfits and drop-outs during the Fifties and late Forties. Lennon’s jaunty impressionistic book takes us into the Sixties, with an account of his experiences as a young journalist writing, sporadically, for the Guardian, while, in the intervals, getting caught up in all kinds of adventures (best of all an improbable encounter, in the company of Samuel Beckett, with Peter O’Toole ...”

“... Even inferior tradesmen had to be kept at bay. The Great Fire of London – the point at which Peter Thorold’s book begins – led to an outflow of the dingier homeless from the City westward. Some were absorbed in rookeries and Alsatias, packed with thieves and noseless beggars, or in the sizable slum which adjoined Whitehall. There was no welcome for ...”

“... unaware of. I’ve never been an enthusiastic member, partly because Larkin wasn’t particularly keen on my stuff or keen on my being keen on his (which I am); Amis (K.) very much of the same mind. It wasn’t this, though, that put me off. What made me dubious about the society was the ...”

“... struck him as ‘bizarre’, in that the interview took place on the day her husband, Peter Robinson, went to Downing Street to accept the role of First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly ‘and there really was a sense that Iris had stolen his thunder’. Black, who was hired as her political adviser, does not say when he decided to ...”

“... wee lassie’, if that’s what was needed, ‘nice way of speaking’, ‘enthusiastic’, ‘keen’, ‘good reasons for wanting the job’, ‘a few exams passed’, ‘clearly looking for work’); a 2 meant they were okay, but less than perfect in all these areas; a 3 meant they were not so presentable, deficient, older, troublesome, or the wrong ...”

“... of Oxbridge voices reviewing an exhibition selected by and posthumously mounted as a tribute to Peter Fuller. The wannabe Oxbridge voice of Giles Auty, art bumbler for the Spectator, declares ‘Peter’ was led by his arguments rather than his eyes. Up speaks real Oxbridge voice, while duly patronising to Auty – not ...”

“... the Habsburg patronage of the visual arts’; Philip II, presented as ‘an exceptionally keen and informed patron of the arts’, despite his notorious inability to appreciate the talents of El Greco; his grandson Philip IV, whose artistic interests were discussed in Brown’s earlier book on Velazquez; and even Philip IV’s sickly son Charles ...”

“... to her. ‘I keep it very quiet,’ he remarks. ‘She is always giving it away.’ Wyatt’s keen sense of self-interest told him to keep quiet about a goose whose golden eggs he badly needed. When others flattered him with talk of his direct line to the Prime Minister, he always made deadpan responses. Moreover, we have the authority of Sarah ...”

“... modification of insanity’, he called it) expressly tailored to the needs of wealthy families keen to deprive relatives who were troublesome, but not insane by the usual criteria, of their civil rights in order to spare the family from ruin or infamy. One noted alienist, John Haslam, hinted at an affinity between respect for property and ...”

“... a handkerchief’. But, unlike D.M. Thomas, both Raven and Archer are accomplished storytellers, keen on verisimilitude. Both are skilled in the use of stock characters, people who seem familiar, so that we may guess how they will respond to events – guess, not predict, for Archer and Raven are acquainted with the least-likely-person technique. Both add ...”

“... account of ‘Russians in 18th-century Britain’. Their profile was modest. Cross started with Peter I’s celebrated visit of 1698. Of around four hundred compatriots who followed in his footsteps, most enrolled as students, although there were also naval recruits, apprentices to shipbuilders and instrument-makers, and others (like British businessmen in ...”

“... but he does not bang on about it. He is telling a story; his mode, to borrow a phrase from Peter Burke, is thick narrative. First he sets up his characters: Abelard himself; his enemy Bernard of Clairvaux, saint and, on Clanchy’s showing, insufferable rhetorician; his lover, short-lived wife and long-lived correspondent Heloise, niece or daughter and ...”

“... open over a secret courtyard, and I could hear what sounded like an old TV broadcast, the voice of Peter Jennings saying it was a historic moment. I wasn’t imagining it: the sound was coming from the Brandenburg Gate, where images from the fall of the Wall were being projected onto the façade to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of reunification.Fresh ...”

“... thoughts, opinions and intentions of writers we are interested in, and by and large writers are keen to express these things in reviews, essays and memoirs subsidiary to their main work. A critic lurks, an implicit presence, in every creative writer, and though most of them are starved of a Boswell to transcribe and irradiate obiter dicta as facets of the ...”

“... Work and scholarship mattered to teachers like Oliver Van Oss, M.N. Forrest, A.J. Marsden and Peter Hazell, fresh back from Normandy, Arnhem or the Far East. ‘You’d better realise how lucky you are to be here, and you’d better justify yourselves’: that was their attitude. I don’t detect the same pressures in Dixon’s book, nor the same ...”