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“... one exemplary indication of the pressures that he was likely to encounter under constant exposure. Norman Tebbit – even then adept at formulating the relevant test to apply and the right euphemism in which to cloak it – had already said that what Joseph lacked was ‘that indefinable quality that makes a national political leader’. In short, the whole ...”

“... The dead writers,’ Eliot said, ‘are that which we know.’ They are also, Peter Ackroyd might want to add, that which we don’t know we know or wish we knew better, agents of prodigious but incomplete hauntings. From The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde to Chatterton, Ackroyd has shown himself an adept in the speech of such ghosts ...”

“... is what it costs these days to make England look like England. The show was created and written by Peter Morgan, its majesty and its wit are his – it would take an American ‘writers’ room’ of a dozen to do wrong what he does right – and a slew of British directing talent led by Stephen Daldry has brought it to the small screen. The British settings ...”

“... mother’s rectitude and parsimony, she did contrive to make a ‘good’ marriage with Montagu Norman, the man who treated the Bank of England’s reserves as if they were his own, and his own as if they were the Bank of England’s. We are afforded the odd glimpse of this old fiscal reactionary, and of some other Thirties dinosaurs like Sir Samuel ...”

“... the few intellectual stars on the Conservative backbenches, the free-range MP for Hereford, Jesse Norman, has published studies of The Big Society (2010) and of Edmund Burke (2013). However, within political traditions the complexities of past politics tend to be viewed through the lens of simplifying mythologies. In fact, Burke was neither a member of the ...”

“... V. Prochnow Jr, with 65 entries by Prochnow senior; and in Quotations For Our Time, by Dr Laurence Peter (author of The Peter Principle), with 37 entries of his own. It’s not wholly a new conceit: even L. T. Hoyt, last century, was not so unjust to himself as to deny his own verses comparison with those of Tennyson and ...”

“... Archigram was an out-of-hours architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the money, sometimes woeful, often funny, reliably coarse ...”

“... of genuine letters written by Paul of Tarsus, they call themselves Paul when they are not Paul, Peter when they are not Peter, James when they are not James, Jude when they are not Jude. Sometimes they put in circumstantial detail to make their claims more plausible: so pseudo-Paul tells his gullible readers ...”

“... eggs, others preferred to call them poached. Either way, any attempt to describe the appearance of Peter Lorre must deal with those eyes. What teeth are to Julia Roberts and lips to Angelina Jolie, his bulging eyes were to Peter Lorre, his unavoidable calling card and a feature quite out of proportion with the norm. He ...”

“... all the poetry. None of these books has the scope or importance of Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. Peter Ackroyd’s Ezra Pound and His World brings together 111 photographs, drawings and other illustrations and offers a linking text summarising the poet’s life and literary career. The biography – inevitably, I suppose – draws heavily on the work of ...”

“... Belloc has enabled conscientious students of history to see both sides. He is delighted to find Norman Stone, at the time a professor of modern history at Oxford, writing in the Sunday Times that he considers Belloc a more perceptive historian than G.M. Trevelyan: ‘I think that, in the end, I shall go to Trevelyan’s enemies, Hilaire Belloc or Lord ...”

“... parts of a single narrative, seem to me pretty feeble. In part one, the hero, the inoffensive Norman Shotover, hurries on down a flight of religious and sexual misadventures in his attempt to become an Anglican clergyman; in part two, having become a Catholic priest, he embarks on a second flight. Certain sequences in both novels have elegance and ...”

“... of course, Arabs would respect America. Prince Khaled expressed his ‘respect’ for General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the US commander in the Gulf, and the American general duly pronounced his own ‘respect’ for Prince Khaled’s generalship. It sometimes seemed there was no end to this mutual admiration, even when Saudi troops fled their posts at the ...”

“... which his father had once shown him; here the circle was complete.’ A sceptic might ask how Peter Ackroyd knows that Dickens’s face bore an infantile look in death? No one there seems to have recorded the fact. Was Ackroyd, like Scrooge, transported to the room by the spirit of biography past? How does Ackroyd know that Dickens’s final mental state ...”

“... few meagre inches of pious editorial. Writing in the Guardian three days after the story broke, Peter Jenkins talked of ‘the practical question of what should be done about the Fleet Street heavy mob bivouacking in Hertfordshire and Wiltshire, the Prime Minister pursued wherever she goes not by lobby correspondents but by crime ...”