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“... Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of alternative cultural criticism. October’s influence on arts professionals has been powerful and lasting, though the editors in feistily refusing ...”

“... with the century itself. Her circumstances were of course relatively comfortable. Kenneth Clark made sure that the royal air-raid shelter was tastefully decorated with Dutch old masters. Nevertheless the aftermath of war left her tired and the next few years of austerity and reconstruction were ‘hard & grinding’. Despite her ultimate longevity she ...”

“... 1939 the stormlit, nervy rhapsodies over ruins for which he is now best known had won over Kenneth Clark, who as director of the National Gallery had been a powerful foe to abstraction and who would henceforward prove an equally powerful patron. Harris makes this switcharound in Piper’s career a model for changes across the board in English culture. Away ...”

“... fall of Milosevic, which was brilliant.’ But there are some great little sketches, as when Alan Clark is added to a North London dinner party as a last-minute guest. The Braggs arrived and Melvyn was horrified. He said he loathed Alan C. Alan and Jane arrived in one of his Bentleys, which could barely squeeze through the two lines of parked cars ...”

“... the fearful conflicts of interest which surround our ecological predicament. Another such book was Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. Singer, like Passmore, devoted much of his time to clearing the ground – marshalling the relevant facts, surveying the range of existing attitudes, pointing out their confusions, and tracing the sources of trouble in the ...”

“... Lamarr as a significant member of her generation of ‘European exiles to Hollywood’ along with Peter Lorre and Ingrid Bergman. Carefully researched and zippily written, the book is the definitive companion to Lamarr’s films, from the glamour of Ziegfeld Girl (1941), in which Hedy sported a showstopping jewelled headdress, to the screwball comedy Comrade ...”

“... was less likely than his contemporaries to be seen in his full complexity and thereby reassessed. Peter Stanford, prompted and supported by Day-Lewis’s widow, the actress Jill Balcon, has now undertaken the work of recovery, and he makes clear that he believes this biography should provide the occasion for a major reassessment of his subject’s standing as ...”

“... The high point of the trip, she told Warner, was a visit to Kensington Gardens to pay homage to Peter Pan. ‘Since I am very indulgent to my childhood romances, and keep holiday with them almost religiously,’ she wrote, ‘I just bowed the knee and worshipped like the Oriental or the Romanist at the sound of prayer bells.’ It was another role she’d ...”

“... brief. The temptation to be generally expansive is hard to resist in this context. The late Lord Clark, for instance, in an interesting lecture on the growth of television, provides some moments of unintentional comedy when he agrees morosely with Burns about ‘this unlimited promiscuity’ (whether in life or on television it is hard to tell) that ...”

“... English. This stateless language is an enlightened and idealistic concept, and it informs the Clark Lectures which Charles Tomlinson delivered in Dryden’s old college, Trinity, Cambridge, in 1982. Tomlinson is an enthusiastic admirer of Dryden, whom he terms ‘the Poundian figure of his age’, and he also speaks inspiringly of the ‘unity of European ...”

“... the preservation of Hollywood’s greatest period of achievement. Hollywood itself never was, and Peter Bogdanovich’s originality as a curator lay in his awareness that it never would be. (Until the prospect of sales to television saved the day, Hollywood’s instinctive homage to a great original film was not only to remake it, but to burn its ...”

“... to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign Office in the Falklands had tried to do’. But unlike Pym, Walker kept his job, because she didn’t dare sack him. In some respects her role in the miners’ strike ...”

“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... was his bag (in high art they call it ‘selective quotation’ or ‘homage’). Having sampled Peter Cave’s biker novelettes, and the works of Mick Norman, Alex R. Stuart and Thom Ryder, he nominated the 18-volume Richard Allen Bildungsroman as his template. Delivered from the bourgeois neurosis invention (the demand for fresh ‘product’), his charged ...”

“... of dirt on it – and being taken far more seriously than they deserved. A writer calling himself Peter Tombs came in the mid-Seventies, promising many of the same sensational revelations as Bunting, only to disappear again when evidence for his allegations failed to materialise. Picking on Bunting is perhaps unfair, for all her British reviewers to date ...”