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“... was world-famous, at least among architects. Hughes had already spotted an unlikely replacement: Peter Hall, then 34, an architect in his own Public Works department who had designed some government-funded university buildings. As a former friend, Hall sought the approval of Utzon, now back in Denmark, for usurping his project, and was puzzled not to get ...”

“... phone calls to the writer, Sam Shepard. For Wings of Desire Wenders had his old collaborator Peter Handke write nine ‘texts’, including a poem about childhood: but otherwise the film had no script. As Wenders told an interviewer, ‘I said to myself, “The idea came so spontaneously, we must go on like that. We must remain spontaneous.” Everyone ...”

“... It was her megaphone message. Such scenes of fear and loathing demand the pen of Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone chronicler of the American campaign trail, for we are in his beloved ‘bat country’, where the dark shapes of power and prejudice swoop around the heads of the bemused voters. What would he have made of the Alliance, with its Pollyanna ...”

“... not only on one politician or party, and least of all on the Civil Service and the executive. Peter Jenkins of the Guardian was the first to get it right, when he told a protest rally: ‘This is Parliament’s war!’ The end of the Falklands affair was not difficult to condemn either. The problem of the islands had been rendered far more ...”

“... to, Monty Johnstone’s is a name that recurs, along with the philosopher Hyman (Hymie) Levy, Peter Fryer the journalist, and Brian Pearce, well known today as a translator of historical works from French and Russian. Levy she remembers as a very persuasive public speaker, whose Edinburgh accent ‘made everything sound reasonable’. Her observation post ...”

“... Since then, and despite the achievements of Hobsbawm, Hilton, Hill, Keith Thomas and E.P. Thompson, it has still been possible for Geoffrey Barraclough in Main Trends in History to surmise that ‘if a consensus were taken today it would almost certainly show that the majority of professional historians is sceptical of, if not positively hostile ...”

“... deal of time studying the life of someone they are liable to end up disliking intensely. Lawrence Thompson was selected by Robert Frost to be his official biographer: after literally living with his subject, the biographer found the poet to be very far from admirable; and the work he produced bore clear evidence of this shift in sentiment. I spent more years ...”

“... Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977), Bertrand Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But (1989), Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). He captures to vivid effect the distinctive lyrical anguish filmmakers like Jennings and Shepitko bring to their portrayal of the damage that war does to people and places; and, like any good historian, he has a ...”

“... up his sleeve. This was an illusion he encouraged, and there was some pleasure in sharing it. Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and ...”

“... for what is inadequately called ‘labour history’: in the hands of Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson et al it is more the biography of a class than a narrative or analysis of politics. A similar spirit has animated the study of the intellectual underworld, and the interrelationship of magic, religion and science. Women’s history – in Britain, mostly ...”

“... in fact, for Miss Harrison’s soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office’. When Charlotte Mew found her individual voice, all these influences persisted, just as her school friends remained her first and last refuge throughout her life. With them, there was ...”

“... But Sand also endorses the hyper-sceptical ‘biblical minimalism’ of Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche, which regards such findings as irrelevant since, as they see it, the early history of Israel is actually a fiction that returnees from the Babylonian exile made up after the sixth century ...”

“... 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 her story. The first two-thirds of the book are ...”

“... Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I persevered, and even persuaded my history teacher to allow me to do an extended A-Level essay on Wordsworth’s political beliefs. I chugged ...”

“... Scepticism are obvious from the opening pages of Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, Sir Peter Strawson’s urbane, elegant, and, alas, short new book: ‘The Sceptic is, strictly, not one who denies the validity of certain types of belief, but one who questions, if only initially and for methodological reasons, the adequacy of our grounds for ...”