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“... grown up around the Second World War, and even at the prime minister (although the groundwork for Peter Cook’s brutal takedown of Harold Macmillan had already been laid by The Goon Show’s Peter Sellers with his sketch ‘Party Political Speech’, which was released as the B-side of a single two years before Beyond the ...”

“... such a policy would be the sure path to mediocrity for our whole university system. Professor D.S. Jones, the Chairman of the UGC Mathematics sub-committee, has put forward for his own subject a quite different policy for deciding which academic staff should be shed. He points out that the great expansion of the Sixties meant that far more academics were ...”

“... How great a diversity, Swift can hardly have imagined; it needed the researches of a William Jones or a Wilhelm von Humboldt to begin to persuade literary Europeans that they were not quite the masters of the speaking world. Now we know better – well, perhaps just a little. We know that something like four thousand languages are spoken in the world ...”

“... Culture and Conquest (2006), or Robert Ferguson’s The Hammer and the Cross (2009), or even Gwyn Jones’s magisterial History of the Vikings (1968, revised 1973). Consider the ‘key questions’ Parker starts with. First, why should Scandinavian societies have turned so suddenly to overseas raiding, and second, why, after several centuries, did the raiding ...”

“... bachelors, and that’s still the template. Dorothy L. Sayers hardly seemed to believe in Peter Wimsey’s passion for Harriet Vane, and no one else is likely to. In his book Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century, Graham Robb made a strong case that the granddaddy of them all, Poe’s Dupin, is coded as homosexual. Offering a dry précis of ...”

“... many, succeeded by Neil Cassady (‘Neil Cassady was my animal: he brought me to my knees’) and Peter Orlovsky. And although Ginsberg’s orientation was basically that of a homosexual masochist, he made occasional forays into heterosexuality, writing enthusiastically to Kerouac of ‘a great new girl who digs me, I dig – 22, young, hip’, with ‘a wild ...”

“... is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen ...”

“... like the entries in Who’s Who. There are some known names: Cecil Beaton, Jasper Johns, James Jones, John Mortimer, Patricia Neal, William Styron, Andy Warhol. Among the rest are antique dealers, decorators, magazine editors, a ‘freelance music co-ordinator for fashion shows’, a princess ‘internationally concerned with matters of spiritual ...”

“... keep a sizeable library in my locker (though my reading was not as highbrow as my fellow historian Peter Burke’s during his stint as a pay clerk in Singapore, which in a typical two days, Vinen tells us, included Galileo, Gide and Rimbaud). Although subject to weekly parades and periodic kit inspections, we were excused weapon training and most other ...”

“... this plump epistolary corpus are letters to or from women, in whose company, as Katherine Duncan-Jones has convincingly argued, Sidney seems always to have been most happy, productive and at ease. There are no surviving exchanges with his wife, Frances, or with his sister, Mary, and no letters relating to his time at Wilton House in Wiltshire, where his most ...”

“... working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy. After all, why bother to vote in the next election if you’ve got a friendly peer you can ...”

“... the demotic: fuck, balls, cock, cunt – this is Larkin’s equivalent of dialect. Nowadays Peter Reading is offering something similar, inserting into a great variety of verse-forms a language that is coarse, prosey and, some say, as they at first said about Larkin, scarcely the language of poetry at all. Reading’s vernacular England isn’t to be ...”

“... I needed to change the character of his performance by restricting its size, as if I was Peter Brook called on to direct Orson Welles or Donald Wolfit (if anyone remembers that name). The obvious priority was getting rid of any possibility of an audience. If it was just the two of us there would be more prospect of damping down his reactions. There ...”

“... his novel set in 18th-century Naples. In Les Trois Femmes de ma vie the young Dominique listens to Peter Pears singing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in a booth at the HMV shop on Oxford Street, with a thrilled sense of eavesdropping on two levels of erotic complicity, not only between Michelangelo and his beloved but also between singer and ...”

“... Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties as a time of diversity and imaginative enterprise. One poet who appears in neither ...”