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“... is what plucks the comedy from this dark drama: it is a story that shows dumbing-down in freefall. Peter Forbes edited Poetry Review between 1986 and 2002, so you’d be right to label him a friend to modern poetry. His magazine never shifted many copies but it always exhibited high standards: make way, then, with sniffles and genuflections, for All the ...”

“... chosen through a proportional-representation formula too complex to be explained here, or to Peter Forbes’s Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the 20th Century in Poetry, a platitudinously introduced but brilliantly chosen collection of poems that manage, in the editor’s words, to ‘capture the flavour of the century with something like ...”

“... activists, many of whom are based in London.Libel tourism isn’t new. In December 1996, Forbes described Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Glushkov as ‘criminals on an outrageous scale’ in a story about Kremlin corruption under Boris Yeltsin. Only 1915 copies of Forbes were distributed in the UK that week ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... every appearance of relish. Maybe he did do that in public – the Derek and Clive dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without ...”

“... of Lamarck. The point that Desmond brings out so well – drawing on the work of Martin Rudwick, Peter Bowler and Michael Bartholomew – is that Darwin’s Origin of Species actually caught Huxley on the wrong foot. If the future of scientific naturalism was, after all, to be bound up with an evolutionary theory, there was a respect in which Huxley had ...”

“... marriage to go, people were telling each other that they had already separated. Her former lover, Peter Quennell, eager for bad news, invited her to lunch at the Etoile and asked about her sex life. But that day she didn’t feel like doing Connolly down, so Quennell soon got bored and asked for the bill. While Cyril dined out on their quarrels, his ...”

“... Durcan’s Going home to Russia, coming two years after The Berlin Wall Café contains 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two ...”

“... version of the supersession of Cheddi Jagan’s government by the People’s National Congress of Forbes Burnham. Grace Nichols delicately suggests the way in which these events impinge on an ordinary, middle-of-the-road black family on the margins of politics. Gem’s sister, Dinah, becomes a civil servant employed by the Marxist regime, and the ‘seeds of ...”

“... told me that he was always surrounded by them in Broadcasting House. The actor and director Bryan Forbes, who would go on to direct Whistle Down the Wind and The Stepford Wives, remembered the help he got from Gamlin. Forbes wrote to him at the BBC – at the time Forbes’s name was John ...”

“... taming the powerful oligarchs overnight. ‘You’re only a photograph away from the cover of Forbes to a jail cell,’ the picture said, and it would have been Surkov’s business to make sure the image was distributed as widely as possible. Eight years later, Khodorkovsky is still behind bars, but the image now says something more like: ‘While I am ...”

“... body, and eyebrows are being raised. ‘What sort of history is the history of the body?’ asks Peter Biller in a recent review, voicing scepticism about the genre itself: even ‘a moderate example of body history’, he concludes, ‘can principally incarnate a certain blindness towards the past.’ Do academics feel similarly hesitant about studying more ...”

“... Yousaf narrowly won the SNP leadership against Sturgeon’s former finance secretary Kate Forbes, a member of the fundamentalist Free Church of Scotland, who emerged from the contest as the backbench standard-bearer of the social and fiscal conservatism that still lurks within her party and in the Scottish media.* Perhaps the SNP really is ‘doing it ...”

“... taken up in hope,’ Crawford says, ‘were always turned against him.’ In 1898 he married Janet Forbes. Her letters, blessedly direct after Ashbee’s, show what the arts-and-crafts life was like for someone who could not escape on a lecture tour when things became dull at home. He kept a distance between himself and emotion which is almost unbelievable. Of ...”

“... and the Book of Genesis), it could not conceivably support life. The Manx naturalist Edward Forbes coined the word ‘azoic’ to describe this self-evidently lifeless zone. By the 1870s he and other oceanographers were eating their words as improved sampling technology retrieved abundant evidence that, in cheerful defiance of human preconceptions, even ...”