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“... 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 ...”

“... Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a heart attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal ...”

“... with its proprietor’s economic interests and opinions, and the Telegraph, owned then by Conrad Black, a Canadian by birth, reflected Black’s far right American views. Both Murdoch and Black were and are extreme Europhobes. Major resigned on the morning of his defeat in 1997. His obvious successor was Kenneth Clarke, who had been an outstanding ...”

“... Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In ...”

“... out of order (Two, One, Three). Philip Hensher described the book’s structure as ‘dazzling, Conrad-like’, and though it’s hardly Nostromo, and doesn’t pretend to be, it is a lot of fun and very well executed.The series as a whole plays a different kind of trick with time. The gaps between the events of the books are smaller than the gaps between ...”

“... that the text disappeared beneath the interpretation.’By contrast, the great merit of Peter McPhee’s new synthesis is the weight it gives to the earthy, even mundane, aspects of revolutionary experience. It examines 1789 from the peripheries, rather than Paris, as seen through the eyes of the menu peuple, rather than from the heights of the ...”

“... that he makes us want to rush off at once and discover or rediscover the world of Ginger Dick and Peter Russet. He draws the most subtle of distinctions between Jacobs’s unerring sense of the human will to be one up and how it gets its way in his elemental contexts, and the bogus literary tradition in which Jacobs had to write to sell his work. A couple of ...”

“... cliché-laden element in that credo were the worst part of it. Here’s an editor, admittedly a Conrad Black editor but nonetheless a national editor, openly saying that nothing was wrong with the BCCI/Westland/Peter Wright/Guinness/Lloyds of London period that could not be corrected by attacks on trend-crazed ...”

“... something that is mine, in order to be able to live at all. In a passage from the story ‘Peter and Rosa’ in Winter’s Tales, published in 1942, the fear is still as real as it had been in 1926 (one cannot be certain when the story was written): Yes he was running away, that was his thanks to her for letting him come into her bed, and for liking ...”

“... respecting the world, and they are the image of a world of respect.Edward’s first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), elaborated the idea that becoming a writer was a project rather than a career, that you poured yourself into a series of works which in turn defined who you were. His second book, Beginnings (1975), exploring ...”

“... terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the gratitude of those ...”

“... rather than later? 15 July 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a lifelong friend of Peter’s from their time together at the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle and now himself Hon. Mr Justice Potts of the Queen’s Bench ...”

“... not necessarily quite in line with each other: but their separateness enhances the effect of both. Conrad often gives the same impression, and like Conrad Jacobson is a stylist in the old-fashioned sense. His novels, too, each address a particular problem, in terms of specification and technique. He never repeats a ...”

“... preference, there is hardly such a thing as a confraternity. ‘Very bad – very good too,’ as Conrad’s Stein would say. With us, both the best and the worst writing seems unconscious that anything else is being written. Writing in America, on the other hand, is a joint pioneering venture, undertaken in a spirit, if not exactly of co-operation with other ...”

“... same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride of Abydos (1813) and St Peter’s sweaty forehead in The Vision of Judgment (1822). There are some uniquely ill-judged moments in the early work, unmatched by anything in the later (‘And therefore came I, in my bark of war,/To smite the smiter with the scimitar,’ ...”