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“... 90 times, against Mark’s nine, and examines at length the verbs describing the discovery by Peter and John of the empty grave. John saw the grave-clothes and believed; Peter saw them and didn’t believe. What they believed or didn’t was in any case wrong, because they got from Mary Magdalene the false report that ...”

“... in hospital. ‘I suppose I’d better dine at my club’). He was also – outside his work – keen to avoid a row, which seems to be how Dee persuaded him to marry her. Dee’s ‘Siege of Freddie’ took several years and many meals (‘rosy pink leg of lamb’ etc). Gully quotes from Dee’s letters to friends: ‘He is a nimble one he is, but I have ...”

“... This book begins with real passion as Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw lash into those historians who they believe have made unwarranted assumptions about the links between Britain and South Africa: to wit, that Britain fought the Boer War to get its hands on the gold and that economic considerations remained the motivating force in its difficult relationship with South Africa thereafter ...”

“... of having their knees nailed to the furniture. The fallen state of Private Eye is illustrated by Peter McKay’s foolish and ill-written book, Inside Private Eye, but scornful young readers should remember that this downmarket old fogey was once a young fogey. It stood up to the Krays, a plucky little public-school rag-mag. This brings us back to The Old ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sings with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we must praise and praise again. Peter Levi, alas, is one of those dwindling, disinterested Arnoldians who can still be uncovered in the home of lost causes. Last year he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford and in his inaugural lecture announced: ‘Today is the feast of Crispinus and ...”

“... The people’s game without the people,’ the football commentator Peter Drury said on 12 March, introducing BT Sport’s coverage of the Europa League fixture between Wolverhampton Wanderers and the Greek side Olympiacos. ‘It’s not the same for you and it’s not the same without you.’ The match was taking place behind closed doors, as all sporting events will be for the foreseeable future ...”

“... from generation to generation,’ Lord Stansgate observed in 1950, adding: ‘He is a very keen and active member of the Church.’ Though young Wedgie was moving away from institutional religion, he remained a true disciple of a secularised nonconformist ethic, ready to declare in 1989: ‘The link between religious dissent and political dissent is in ...”

“... them, because they yearn for beauty. Lenin had no feeling for beauty whatsoever. He just kept a keen watch, with his narrow, Mongolian eyes, to see who could be used, and how.’ Teffi left the paper when she felt it was becoming a party organ, and gradually she became a star. She published 19 books in a dozen years and her plays were staged all over the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... canopy spangles the tarmac and stone below. But something about its acid yellow, turquoise and keen green jangles me. Gillick’s array of insistently synthetic tints feels less like a reference to consumerism than a grammar of it. I wish that grammar would express something; I wish it were about something. If only its greens related more to the grass ...”

“... brown hatter’. But in his third novel, Pompes Funèbres, written in 1947, the oppostions are, as Peter Coe points out in his excellent 1968 study of Genet, beginning to show worrying signs of being out of control. In Pompes Funèbres we are offered Hitler as Saviour, Nazi officer Erik Seiler as love object and an ecstasy of moaning over the ravishing of la ...”

“... organiser, tells us about her year spent recovering from residual infatuation with ‘Perfect Peter’ (the specious creep who dumped her the year before) and falling in love with nice, kind, attractive Andy. These books are not exactly works of literature. They do not aspire to be. They aim instead to replicate the easy, jokey, demotic tone of girl ...”

“... it made Self momentarily speechless. ‘Belly of an architect,’ he said, using the title of the Peter Greenaway movie to express his amazement. ‘A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the Western eye,’ Joan Didion said. She was writing about California, where pools, in her view, were less a symbol of ...”

“... to turn round and tell you it isn’t? This test is, however, triumphantly passed by Ann Barr, Peter York and the intrepid and diligent team of assistant fieldworkers with whom they have penetrated far and deep into the rose-red canyons of SW3, 1, 7, 10, 6 and 5 – correctly ranked in that order – and the near- and far-flung outposts where there ...”