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“... a huge leap from the ‘dauntless master’ of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company to Peter Porter among the ‘takeaways’, ‘civic galleries’ and ‘cement escarpments’ of Rusholme. When the history of indebtedness comes to be written, quirkier contributions will be charted: Eberhart’s gift to Geoffrey Hill; Muldoon’s ‘Immram’ as a ...”

“... neither of them really unexpected after years of frailty, but both, Doris Lessing and her son, Peter, having attachments of some complexity to each other, to my daughter and to me, going back even before I went at 15 to live in their house. When she died last November at the age of 94, I’d known Doris for fifty years. In all that time, I’ve never ...”

“... no attempt to assess his contribution to literature.* Yet this is to give us Hamlet without the prince. Darkness at Noon, which was first published in 1941, is one of the most talented, besides being one of the most influential, novels of this century. Mr Hamilton simply takes it as read. All that he tells us is that it was originally written in ...”

“... then. I’d forgotten his part in Lawrence of Arabia, but there he is again, this time as an Arab prince, perfectly plausible in a rather specialised movie sense of the term, and also perfectly his own poised multiple self. Lawrence of Arabia is at the other end of the scale from Brief Encounter, and is certainly the most interesting of the later films. The ...”

“... the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people ...”

“... yet he can’t stop himself looking through someone’s record collection to find his favourite Prince LP. The Faber Book of Pop is especially good at capturing the impact of pop music, the inexplicable power of the right sound in the right place at the right time. Jon Savage and Hanif Kureishi have gathered more than a hundred and fifty pieces extracted ...”

“... a quotation from one of them, is if anything worse.) After this, it is a relief to learn from Peter Levi’s lively and delightful biography that Dr Zhivago (Dr Alive) was a name Pasternak had seen on the cover of a Moscow manhole, rather as Dickens claimed to have spotted a Copperfield and a Chuzzlewit on the signs of poor London shops. Quite apart from ...”

“... rap for the exquisite but evil Margot Beste-Chetwynde, and reflects onthe undeniable cogency of Peter Beste-Chetwynde’s ‘You can’t see Mamma in prison, can you?’ The more Paul considered this, the more he perceived it to be the statement of a natural law. He appreciated the assumption of comprehension with which ...”

“... fingers and hands move – this book shows it. The section on Bach in the set of essays edited by Peter Williams mainly deals with matters of performance in a more conventional way. The most interesting of the essays is by the editor himself, on ‘Figurae in the Keyboard Works of Scarlatti, Handel and Bach’. The problem is that in the 18th century ...”

“... A place in society – harder for a painter to win in England than Paris – was established. The Prince of Wales came to parties at her house in Maddox Street and she said (there is evidence that she may again have exaggerated royal interest in her affairs) that it was he who arranged permission for her to stay when an edict issued after the breakdown of the ...”

“... manipulating the whole situation?’ I said I didn’t know. ‘It’s Fortinbras, the crown prince of Norway, who takes over Denmark at the end. Horatio and the visiting players are in his employ: their mission is to tip Hamlet over the edge and foment conflict in Elsinore. Look at the play again. Hamlet’s father killed Fortinbras’s father, he has ...”

“... grew up books-obsessed: as a 13-year-old she travelled to see Tolstoy to beg him not to kill off Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace, then being serialised; she lost her nerve when she met him and just gave him a photo to sign. She got married when she was 18, to a judge, and moved to his estate in the provinces, but after ten years and three children she ...”

“... Something had happened recently to confirm this in Bill’s mind. At school two years previously, Peter Kearney – a short, pinched boy with hair on his upper lip and eyebrows like soot smudges – had begun to taunt him, at first only about small things, but subsequently about things more serious, like the quality of his handwriting and the answers he gave ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel has been caught in the Gadarene rush of fiction brought out in time for the Booker Prize deadline. It won’t be lost in this year’s profusion of titles, and it won’t be harmed by the published assurance of a colleague of his on the Times that it is ‘a sure contender’ for the prize ...”

“... cell? Would it be any more or any less improper to pay someone for handing over a photograph of Prince William wearing a bikini? The court cases were scarcely covered by the Fleet Street newspapers, save to complain that they were taking place at all (the Daily Mail described Elveden as ‘a disgraceful attempt by police and prosecutors to intimidate ...”