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“... production of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell meant to write a libretto and duly boned up with intensive attendance at the New York Met, but never delivered. John Ashbery has not, so far as I know, produced a libretto – only the poem, ‘Syringa’, specially composed for a ...”

“... to the second volume of their Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker point out that the nine-year run of the Dial alone amounts to ‘around 10,500 pages of text and 1200 pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this equals some 3.1 million words to read … about equivalent to ...”

“... In summer​ 1876, Peter Kropotkin was given a pocket watch by a visiting relative. He was 33 years old, bore one of the Russian Empire’s oldest princely titles and had been a page de chambre to Tsar Alexander II. He was already famous in Russia for his scientific work on zoology and glaciation. Two years earlier, however, he had been arrested and imprisoned as a member of a revolutionary secret society ...”

“... happen here. But the prevailing breeziness in the UK seems to me ill-founded, and I’m not alone. Peter Olson, until recently the chairman and CEO of Random House, wrote in Publishers Weekly last month: ‘While 2008 ended on a disappointing and even discouraging note for many in the book industry, the outlook for the new year is even bleaker. One-time ...”

“... Since they also sing the praises of meekness as a political virtue, they are unlikely to prove Peter Mandelson’s favourite reading. Bobbio distinguishes four kinds of relation between ethics and politics. There are two brands of monism which respectively reduce ethics to politics (Hobbes) and politics to ethics ...”

“... theory we wish to test.’ And this will be true even if the author has the mature and ranging reading of an Appleyard; and even if the rudimentary theory started out as a hunch that things don’t really hang together in any of the ways they used to, or as people in the past may have thought they did. For instance, it is now fashionable to profess a bias ...”

“... translation is uneven but improves as it goes along; whoever was responsible for the final proof-reading should be sent back in time and made to march on Moscow. Philip Longworth’s elegant account of Alexis Romanov, Tsar of Russia from 1645 to 1676, claims to be ‘the first full biography ... in any language for 150 years’. This is misleading as another ...”

“... John Arden’s confidence in animating this period (and there is evidence of enormous background reading) is considerable; it is impressive; it is unusual. But it is unusual chiefly as a sustained exercise in elaboration and obfuscation. By the end of the novel the reader is left with no very clear idea of the author’s purpose – yet it is quite clear ...”

“... writing with every semblance of scruple about distant parts of the world. The Times correspondent, Peter Nichols, recently told his readers that El Salvador was a microcosm of Latin America, and he is the author of a book that lovingly details the varieties of the Italian peninsula. His The Pope’s Divisions scorns any such discrimination for the larger ...”

“... years later, she married a future postmaster; they had three children – Basil and Winifred and Peter. She published a few stories in magazines, and was sneered at by her husband’s relatives. In her sixties she wrote three books which made her famous as an articulate inhabitant of that strange planet, the countryside. The books in the trilogy called Lark ...”

“... else. Two authors are credited: ‘by Robert Katz’ is coupled with, in smaller type, ‘and Peter Berling’. The latter is a German film producer, who, says Katz, ‘cannot be called a Fassbinder person’. This formula is used throughout the book (sometimes reduced to FPs) to designate a groupie. Berling, however, is said to possess impressive ...”

“... precision and wit of a Fowler ... a delight to read and a mine of useful instruction’, while Peter Clayton, in the sterner fashion befitting the Sunday Telegraph, thought that ‘it’s not often you get a hook so worthy of purpose, so forthright, so amusing and yet so balanced.’ The reviewer for the Scotsman, traditionally anonymous, was given pride ...”

“... Winshaw Prize’ stars Josephine Winshaw-Eaves, the daughter of Hilary Winshaw and Sir Peter Eaves, a newspaper editor. Like her mother, Josephine is a tabloid columnist in the Katie Hopkins mould. She attends an awards ceremony for a prize her family has sponsored and put its name to – a prize, ridiculously, for the best prize (it goes to the ...”

“... the rhythms of thought and breaking the natural phrase as if breaking a surface. Her translator, Peter Graves, more than rises to the challenge this presents. He has found a register in English – both offhand and choral – that brings the voices together without letting them merge. The result is that these eight hundred sparse pages offer as much as a ...”

“... Myself, I regret her refusal, since the account of her undercover work would make for fascinating reading. Imagine, if you will, the Secretary of State for War and 20-year-old Christine Keeler in bed, relaxing perhaps after their exertions. ‘Jack darling, that was . . . just . . . mmm.’ ‘It certainly was, my little lollipop.’ ‘Umm, Jack ...”