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“... background was traditional; both his parents spoke excellent French, and all his early reading was in that language. His social background was much less traditional. His mother, known in Petersburg as ‘the beautiful Creole’, was the granddaughter of a black slave, traditionally thought to have been a captured Ethiopian, though Binyon, with ...”

“... when this unfamiliar terminology is embedded in an impersonal, “scientific” prose, constant reading of which induces a form of hypnosis that begins by causing a decrease in one’s attention and ends by sending one to sleep.’ And in his introduction Stanley Clinton Davis comments: ‘the pollution of the seas is not principally a scientific or an ...”

“... wordless work like the String Trio define with quasi-mathematical precision. It is, incidentally, Peter Labanyi, not Bill Hopkins, who rightly translates ‘committed’; Bill Hopkins turns it into the foreign-sounding ‘engaged’. And while both translations seem competent, Labanyi’s is the more natural. But then he could no doubt avail himself of the ...”

“... of the novel, makes no reference to the most obtrusive aspect of my own response to it. Reading Letters was sheet drudgery. I was bored and irritated to the point of groaning exasperation. And since this is a work to which a manifestly gifted writer has devoted ten years of his life it seems necessary to try to justify so hostile a reaction. The ...”

“... flame) has been observed as frequently as legend suggests, and it is not clear whether or not Peter Mayle himself witnessed the burning of the ten-pound note that had masqueraded as a tip (although he claims that the perpetrator of the deed is a friend). But why then does this legend persist? Presumably because, for some, the idea of wealth, power and ...”

“... digesting the Times at the Reform or Athenaeum, before sorting out the world’s evils. But as Peter Clark, Britain’s leading urban historian, notes in a characteristically fact-packed but thoughtful study, that most English of institutions was going strong long before then. Indeed, Sam Johnson’s beloved ‘clubbable’ men must have been in clover in ...”

“... superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London ...”

“... for some highly stimulating feuds between feminism and New Historicism – it is no wonder that Reading Shakespeare Historically should resonate with the preoccupations of that particular arena. After all, this is essentially an anthology of conference papers delivered there (and at other such gatherings) over the last decade, despite intermittent attempts ...”

“... This process has enriched our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the ...”

“... of the harbour at Belle-Ile, broadly painted in bright colours, marks the influence of John Peter Russell, the Australian artist, who’d been a friend of Van Gogh. At the end of that year Matisse painted The Dinner Table – quite big, more than three feet by four – a late Impressionist interior, innocuous enough one might think, yet the first in a ...”

“... that was showing. Meanwhile, amid the grimness of ‘home’ and the fantasies of abroad, he was reading Freud and writing short stories. The seeds of his science fiction may have been sown in wartime Shanghai, but they germinated in postwar England. His early adult life could almost be a blueprint for the struggling young writer of the mid-20th century: two ...”

“... however much some would wish it otherwise. There is thus nothing untimely in the publication of Peter Clarke’s elegant and absorbing book. Dr Clarke writes it consciously as a historian, and though he generously acknowledges the work of those students of Keynes who are economists, his approach is primarily historical. He works on two ...”

“... to find so many of them trying to place him firmly in the tradition of English poetry. Their calm reading of his gamier poems, and the absence of those long dashes that used to make him seem too mealy-mouthed to write what he meant, indicate roughly the date of the essays, but otherwise, apart from occasional phrases such as ‘sexual politics’ or ...”

“... Brazilian Adventure?’ the young travelogue aspirant ventured to ask, to be crisply told that Peter Fleming’s book had sold as an adventure, not as a book about Brazil. Fleming’s two prewar travel books, the Brazilian one and News from Tartary, which is still better, succeeded so well because their author instinctively took to heart the advice of ...”

“... blend of primatology and psychoanalysis, treating the penis as a transcendental signifier and reading the meanings of making love without reference to cultural conventions. A theory which claims to challenge universalising notions of sexuality depends on universalising interpretations of sex. As Simon Goldhill shows in his subtle and complex new ...”