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“... know, ’cause I forgot right then what I like.’ Lena Dunham needs to inhabit a part; Roxane Gay looks at the clothes in her wardrobe, thinks she might wear something different for three minutes, then picks one of the ten outfits she wears all the time; Eufemia Fantetti wore trackpants for a year before her father asked whether she wanted to look ...”

“... of colour in Ealing films – or in many British films of the 1950s, for that matter – and no gay characters either (although Dennis Price and Robert Hamer, the star and director of Kind Hearts and Coronets, were both gay). The quintessential ‘Englishness’ so often lauded in these films wasn’t total: throughout ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... sometimes spontaneously, at worst like tonic water shaken to restore a semblance of lost vitality. Peter Conrad goes in more for weight. You could say of him what the earlier James extravagantly observed of the earlier Conrad, that he offers a prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed. In other words, he ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... There was little to suggest, twenty-odd years ago, that Superintendent Andrew Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe would develop as they have, except Reginald Hill’s unusual and wise decision never to write consecutive novels about them.* Their debut in A Clubbable Woman (1970) came eight years after Julian Symons had first pronounced the ‘detective story’ dead; as late as 1989 T ...”

“... give direction to his life. The problems of the flock are various: Shirley, a young woman whose gay husband has run off with another man, is lonely, and her son is more deeply damaged still by his father’s desertion. Norah, a retired nurse, is unhappily married to a barrister who grieves petulantly for the domestic efficiency and subservience of his dead ...”

“... the biographer, who is too preoccupied to notice the defection, writing busily about himself. Peter Feibleman followed his mistress Lillian Hellman, notebook in hand, to her dying breath – although, he tells us, ‘I didn’t need notes to remember my conversations with Lillian, I would have needed shock treatment to forget them.’ They were both ...”

“... rock group Coil, now sadly no more since the deaths of its two founding members, Geoff Rushton and Peter Christopherson, whom I knew, though not especially well. When I interviewed Rushton (a.k.a. John Balance) in 2000, one of the things that came up was his deep, abiding love for Kate Bush. Actually, it was more like he saw her as some form of household deity ...”

“... Paul VI, John XXIII’s liberal-minded successor, died in 1978, he was followed on the throne of Peter by Albino Luciani, Patriarch of Venice, a man so administratively inept that he chucked a sheaf of papers in desperation over the parapet of the apostolic palace, and was discovered by his secretary weeping in sheer terror of his cardinal secretary of ...”

“... obliged to make a formal complaint: ‘What if she doesn’t want to tell her story?’ Roxane Gay asks in Bad Feminist. Look back over the objections to the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter and you can see that in each instance it was trying to smooth the path for women plaintiffs whom the system notoriously lets down whenever they bring legal charges or try ...”

“... he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an autobiography, and died a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore ...”

“... Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or ‘received ideas’) which they shared so confidently in their youth ...”

“... a hole, laid down some perforated cardboard over it, and ‘selected a favourite picture’. ‘Peter turned around. I got down on the ground, checked to see if he was looking, took my dick out of my trousers, and fucked the wet black hole.’ Around the same age I also bought copies of the Sun with my friends, as well as the Star and the People. It may ...”

“... Early on in this book there is a photograph of the British architect Peter Cook’s living-room ‘circa 1970’. Cook is now Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium for the 2012 London Olympics. But he was a young adventurer back then, a founder of the archetypal 1960s and 1970s avant-garde architects’ collective Archigram, which came up with never built but influential schemes for futuristic ‘walking’ buildings and ‘plug-in’ cities ...”