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“... a trench full of glowing charcoal. As with the trench method, the populace gathered to watch or to read about how the defendants survived this ancient, agonising, irrational test of virtue. They did survive, and I think that most of the villeins and churls shuffled back to their hovels thoroughly satisfied by the drama and the ritual and inclined to add the ...”

“... memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix. They hid themselves, and read every book. But though the dreaming reader persisted in Henri, he became tough and intransigent. He was sent to the Lycée Voltaire and didn’t like it, started to train for the Navy and didn’t like it, prepared for the entrance exam for the Ecole Normale ...”

“... Gallipoli campaign than we think. Those, like me, whose awareness of the disaster is limited to Peter Weir’s Gallipoli will have fallen for the biggest myth of all: that Gallipoli was primarily an Antipodean tragedy. In fact, as Hell’s Foundations soon makes clear, Britain lost 21,000 men there – twice as many as Australia and New Zealand put ...”

“... that ‘Mr Hudson writes with the elegance, 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Eliot’s journal, recording ‘Mr Thackeray’s passing’. This last was clearly inspired by Peter Ackroyd’s imaginary conversation between Chatterton, T.S. Eliot, Dickens and Oscar Wilde in his biography of the Great Inimitable. By such techniques, Ackroyd believed, biography could become an ‘agent of true knowledge’, liberating itself from the ...”

“... to life, however, none seems more remote than that of the Renaissance court. True, students who read Burckhardt – as many still do – find nothing more fascinating than his accounts of courts and festivals. His analysis of how courtiers made their lives into works of art, consciously crafting every word and gesture to outdo their rivals and charm their ...”

“... of all time, that he had martyred early Christians and perhaps even sent two apostles, Peter and Paul, to their deaths and subsequent sainthood. The scale and intensity of the fire would be hard to overstate. It spread quickly from one of the shops adjoining the Circus Maximus to the Circus itself, the upper levels of which were largely made of ...”

“... are analyses, rather than expressions, of appetite. Picasso’s pictures showing artist and model read as memories or prefigurations of sex, whence their extraordinary energy. Matisse’s pursuit of the sources of visual pleasure seems, despite the simple subject-matter, to be monitored (if not exactly driven) by thoughts about shapes and colours, as well as ...”

“... of saving at the time.’) Then Larkin (who had published two novels while still in his twenties) read his friend’s typescript, making fundamental and detailed suggestions for improvement. Leader provides an excellent account of Larkin’s contribution to the revising of what became Lucky Jim, a contribution, Larkin was prone to feel later in his life, that ...”

“... and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden agenda’, long ago exposed to the light of Freudian day: in this Oedipal reading, Mozart’s ‘unconscious rage against his father, disciplinarian and exploiter’, is reflected in Don Giovanni’s unsuccessful attempt ...”

“... Great Apes looks down on them for comic relief. Each is, in its own way, amply unsuccessful. Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow made a stir a couple of years ago. Its plot was muddled, but it did have an ingratiating heroine and lots of ethnic local colour; and things happened too fast for you to think about them much. It was a good enough ...”

“... There have been other general books, but Woodcock’s has been by far the most successful. Peter Marshall’s Demanding the impossible is a broad survey – an expensive hardback, efficiently written, similarly designed for ordinary readers but with plenty of notes to please scholars. Like Woodcock, Marshall is close to the subject, neither an academic ...”

“... many extended passages of high style in A Journey, but those there are make a lasting impression. Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, he says, made a formidable political team. ‘Peter would slip into the castle through a secret passageway and, by nimble footwork and sharp and incisive thrusts of the rapier, cleave his ...”

“... relations’ in the aftermath of McDaid’s death. But it’s far from encouraging to read that one of McDaid’s relatives was arrested barely a month after the killing on charges of ‘incitement to hatred’ and ‘behaviour likely to stir up hatred’. According to the charge sheet, Peter Neill ...”