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“... self-destructive, stripped of family, a figure who slides towards pathos and even absurdity (Peter Sellers as moustache-twitching Gallic ingénu). At the beginning of the trail, the central event has already happened; the detective, divested of any power to abort or determine, can only reconstruct, seeking an origin, an ‘answer’. The genre is ...”

“... a government pension, he wrote: ‘I depend upon myself and do the best I can, which is bad.’ As Peter Whitmer puts it in The Inner Elvis (1996), ‘there was a history to the emptiness that flawed Vernon’s character and created the subsequent psychological hole in Elvis’s personality. Both the lack of and the need for a father figure seemed to be a ...”

“... a deprivation of liberty under Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights). In 2004 Peter Hain, then the Labour Leader of the House of Commons, introduced laws designed to curb anti-war protests in Parliament Square. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, aimed at the Iraq War protester Brian Haw, included a ban on using ...”

“... But there were moments of real conversation and he spoke of real grievances,’ Adeline Vaughan Williams wrote after one of many visits with her husband, Gurney’s one-time teacher of composition, admirer and longstanding advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick ...”

“... disdainful about actions that strike me as taking a bit of nerve: for instance, Helen Maria Williams at the Luxembourg prison is described ‘doling out bracing cups of tea’, as if Joyce Grenfell had strayed into post-revolutionary France, and Coleridge is said to have ‘skulked off to enlist under a pseudonym in the dragoons’. He keeps his higher ...”

“... at Number 10 was more like a medieval court, a centre of intrigue and morbid suspicion. Marcia Williams, as she then was, had a sharp political intelligence as well as a commanding personality, but some of the others were dreadful toadies. On one occasion, during Wilson’s first year, I told one of my Transport House contacts that perhaps the Prime ...”

“... and technical virtuosity ... the almost imperceptibly modern, silver-chiming resonance of “Peter Quince at the Clavier” ’. These aspects of the ‘new’ poetry ‘do much to ameliorate popular displeasure’. Certainly under Marianne Moore’s considering eye all the starkness of the new disappears into her own vision of ‘all this fiddle’, as ...”

“... greatest symphonist since Beethoven, had no interest in folksong (though he studied with Vaughan Williams and liked and respected him), adored jazz for its virtuosity and instrumental sound but had little patience with most of the so-called symphonic jazz of the 1920s. The key to this apparent ragbag of a pantheon is that Lambert had come to music from ...”

“... of John Butt, professor of English at Newcastle during his time there:He launched [his colleague Peter] Ure and myself on our career as reviewers – which causes me to reflect that in thirty-odd years I have written several hundred reviews, an example I would strongly urge the young not to follow. It is, once one begins, all too easy. Somebody mentioned me ...”

“... This book begins with real passion as Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw lash into those historians who they believe have made unwarranted assumptions about the links between Britain and South Africa: to wit, that Britain fought the Boer War to get its hands on the gold and that economic considerations remained the motivating force in its difficult relationship with South Africa thereafter ...”

“... betrayals of the SDP: the conversations which David Steel and I had with Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams at the Konigswinter Conference in April 1981 and the Llandudno fringe meeting at which Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams spoke on the same platform as Jo Grimond and David Steel. Both occasions were informed by genuine ...”

“... anxiously lurk beneath the poem’s surface, desperate to be confessed. It wasn’t until he met Williams in 1950 that he realised poetry could be written in everyday English, and then he immediately went to the opposite extreme, writing flat monochrome slabs describing New Jersey sewage works and factories. ...”

“... at the Old Bailey on 8 May 1979. The main prosecution witnesses, Norman Scott, the ex-Liberal MP Peter Bessell and the dog-slaying Newton, all admitted that they had been great liars in the past but said that they were now telling the truth. Some of them, it turned out, stood to make far more money on their newspaper stories if their evidence secured a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... taste of the new fastidiousness. Lawrence’s critics, on the other hand, are rarely fastidious. Peter Balbert’s challenge to feminist ‘misreadings’ of Lawrence, for example, is nothing if not combative. Balbert insists that the ‘seminal’ doctrines of the ‘phallic imagination’ have been seriously misrepresented by the (presumably ...”