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“... as a foolish parasite on Johnson’s greatness, a ‘tomtit twittering on an eagle’s back’, as Peter Pindar had called him. Then, in 1925, the seesaw that had always been Boswell’s fate tilted once again. That year saw the beginning of one of three remarkable American initiatives, all linked in some way to Yale University, that would considerably enrich ...”

“... interpret such conflicts in terms of ideology or class legislation can find a useful corrective in Peter Jones’s demonstration of the almost infinite variety of local circumstances. What suited the wealthy in one village might work to the advantage of smallholders in the next. In a situation like this, any policy of innovation at the centre was bound to have ...”

“... Fascist but a reactionary, a distinction lost on those of his critics who, in the words of Edmund Burke, know nothing of politics but the passions they incite. Ideologically speaking, Fascism is as double-visaged as the Modernism with which it was sometimes involved, casting a backward glance to the primitive and primordial while steaming dynamically ahead ...”

“... of the crime, yet compassion for the criminal. Later, in the afterword to Lucretia, he quoted Burke to justify his claim that ‘the image of crime, made execrable, may pain and revolt us, but for that very reason, it does not allure or corrupt.’ It was partly such self-justifications that provoked James Thomson’s judgment on Bulwer-Lytton in ...”

“... was striking in the reforms of local government which he undertook in concert with his protégé Peter Walker. It is a pity that Ziegler doesn’t mention these, though Campbell covers them well, for the Heath-Walker reforms show Heathco at its crassest. Counties like Berkshire, which had lasted for a thousand years, were to be axed or have their boundaries ...”

“... Republican leadership. Then, in November 1989, the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, publicly admitted that it was ‘difficult to envisage the military defeat’ of a force such as the IRA ‘because of the circumstances under which they operate’ and that if a political debate were to ‘start within the terrorist ...”

“... rising in Polish Ukraine and a devastating Swedish invasion known as the Deluge. To the east, Peter the Great was transforming old Muscovy into an expanding Russian empire, concluding that the Commonwealth was blocking its way into Europe. It was Peter, backed by the ambitious Prussian kings, who founded the policy of ...”

“... his bleeding face, and if we are as severe as these editors, and if we want to keep that moment (Peter Brook, for example, didn’t), we have really to accept a version of the play that lacks over a hundred lines found only in the Folio. The General Introduction ably defends these editorial principles, and along the way gives a very lucid and engaging ...”

“... of card-vote and constituency, trade-union bluff with Parliamentary cant, Deakin crossed with Burke’. The second were the voices of left intellectuals from Europe. It was to these, especially to Sartre and Gramsci, that Anderson was drawn. Assuming with Gramsci that the history of France was the norm, all else deviation, and distanced from his ...”

“... 1980s. Most striking is the ‘modernity of witchcraft’, a phrase coined by the anthropologist Peter Geschiere. Technology, science, prosperity and education do not necessarily inhibit the belief in witchcraft; they may actually propagate it, especially if accusing witches breaks with a colonial past and helps to realise national identity. South Africa’s ...”

“... was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its composition. Locke’s second Treatise, it emerged, was written ...”

“... and floating five ideas plausibly. Obama keeps a list of his achievements and – according to Peter Baker in a recent New York Times Magazine profile – judges himself to have accomplished 70 per cent of what he hoped in his first two years. Jay Gatsby, too, kept lists, and one may be reminded of Gatsby’s ‘Platonic conception of himself’. The ...”

“... toward its ‘eccentric’ end. ‘What Williams sees, he sees in a flash,’ his friend Kenneth Burke remarked in 1922, calling him ‘the master of the glimpse’: Williams mastered not only the flash and the glimpse but their aural equivalents, the bit of dialogue or monologue which, arranged as verse, illuminates not a scene but a speech and its ...”

“... why else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of ...”

“... as different as Maurice Blanchot, Iris Murdoch and Giorgio Agamben. Wittgensteinians such as Peter Winch and Cora Diamond have felt kinship with her ideas about language and morality. The feminist philosopher Andrea Nye has suggested that Weil’s emphasis on obligations rather than rights might offer a way out of the impasse over abortion in the ...”