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“... having come in from the cold, as it were, of the Heath years. He has now written a book about Peter Carrington, who resigned, of course, as Foreign Minister after the Argentines invaded the Falklands in April 1982. The book may sell: but not to Lord Carrington. Mrs Thatcher’s England is also the theme of a curious book written by Count Filo della ...”

“... hard it is not to call her Beryl!) feels a nervous sympathy with a remark made by the producer of Peter Pan in her previous novel, An Awfully Big Adventure: ‘I don’t want any truck with symbolic interpretations.’ Characteristically, she doesn’t want to look serious, and people who don’t look serious tend not to be taken seriously. (She is generally ...”

“... went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner at the firm until last month, when Starmer appointed ...”

“... years later, she married a future postmaster; they had three children – Basil and Winifred and Peter. She published a few stories in magazines, and was sneered at by her husband’s relatives. In her sixties she wrote three books which made her famous as an articulate inhabitant of that strange planet, the countryside. The books in the trilogy called Lark ...”

“... as in its faults. It is generally accurate on points of detail, despite the confusion between two Peter Martyrs and the erroneous assumption that there was only one Compagnia della Calza – there were, in fact, scores of these noble dramatic societies. Lord Norwich writes a vigorous and fluent prose. He is unafraid of moral judgments and even personification ...”

“... For 27 years Michael Wharton has written the ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph. He was only 43 when he secured this good, steady job and now he has published an autobiographical account of his 43 apprentice years – dissident, drifting, bohemian years, marked by a lack of will-power, what the Greeks called aboulia ...”

“... Joyce’s work as a whole, he is vigorously interesting and helpful. The body-language of Richard Brown’s book is far more specific than Parrinder’s, but his assumptions are much the same. He has two aims in mind. ‘One tries to place Joyce’s work in the context of ideas in which he participated.’ The ideas in view are mainly connected with ...”

“... Conference. Major remains insistent that Back to Basics did not amount to a moral crusade. It was Peter Lilley and John Redwood, his hard-right opponents in the Conservative Party, who revisited the issues of single mothers and sexual continence. Nevertheless, Major admits in his autobiography that Back to Basics was devised as a challenge to entrenched ...”

“... poem. If these are dodged, a totalising vision and vocabulary may take over. Like Hughes, Peter Redgrove has developed a brand of ready-mix poetic utterance. Poems 1954-1987, now out in paperback, leaves a homogenised taste of apples, dew, leaves, clouds, mists, spiders, ‘juices and saps’. However, it accords with Redgrove’s ...”

“... be constructed in a museum, the most satisfying publication on sale at the exhibition is Elizabeth Brown’s book of Brancusi’s photographs. The studio photographs are also reproduced in the catalogue, often facing colour plates of the same subjects, made in the technically brilliant high-key manner perfected for the photography of watches, glass and ...”

“... Melbourne tram downtown, stopping only to glance in a bookseller’s window. It was good to see Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore holding its place in the bestseller list. 1 A good cop yarn set in Victoria, stylistically it is West Coast American, and has been received well there. But that’s not why it’s so popular here. The book sets out to ...”

“... fuses to Iraq. Another judge who simply could not believe that Parliament, in the shape of Peter Lilley, could contemplate starving asylum seekers to death and thus violating their ‘basic human rights’ was Lord Justice Simon Brown. But it was Simon Brown QC who appeared in the ...”

“... this case has been “Just another death, just another murder in Blackpool,” ’ said Jonathan Brown, news editor of the Gazette. ‘I’m afraid it’s a very common phenomenon here.’ Young people turn up at the start of the season looking for work, just as Christopher had done, and are left high and dry when the tourist trade ebbs away in ...”

“... on the doorstep (a cycling accident, David claimed). The same chequered lino is there, the same brown curtains; the jigsaw my grandmother was in the middle of when she died is still out on the table, dusty and half-assembled. On the wall in the corridor hangs the granddaughter clock she left me and that I’ve never seen. David has trouble looking you in ...”

“... account of her difficulties in her first job, as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Gordon Brown’s deputy, are typical of the descriptions she gives of her ministerial career as a whole. She stresses her own inadequacy and failure in a way it’s almost impossible to imagine a man’s political memoir doing. Labour was trying to avoid saying that the ...”