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“... admit that, while telling a good story, his biography offers little close reading of the poems. Peter Levi’s Tennyson is particularly strong in this department; ‘Poetry is what makes him mysterious,’ he tells us. Levi’s long first section, ‘The Birth of the Poet’, is an illuminating investigation of Tennyson’s childhood reading, and its ...”

“... of his generation. In the 15th essay of this volume he tells the German social democrat, Peter Glotz, that his ‘political activities today, such as they are, do not depend on whether I am in the Communist Party or not’. But the manner in which he has to defend these activities, at least as it appears in this book, is directly influenced by his ...”

“... that fits him to his biography. Wilde was to become a ‘common prisoner’, wear convict dress, read Dante in Reading Gaol and write a great and scarifying ballad about a murderer’s execution. However, what fascinated him in 1882 was the image of that tidy, white, utilitarian building with books of poems inside it. What relation could Dante and Shelley ...”

“... home. Before taking the 22 nembutals which killed him, Halliwell left a suicide note: ‘If you read his diary all will be explained. K.H. P.S. Especially the latter part.’ In fact, the diaries only complicate the picture – particularly Orton’s reputed lack of feelings. When Halliwell is threatening suicide, Orton suddenly erupts: ‘I won’t have ...”

“... Brazil and the political status of the Golan Heights. They are prime movers of the world of today. Peter Pringle, formerly of the Sunday Times, now of the Observer, and James Spigelman, with civil service experience inside Gough Whitlam’s Government in Australia, have put together a remarkably well-informed, coherent and readable survey of this vast ...”

“... sea to help Odysseus, a ‘woman who flies’? What about the Wilis in Giselle or Tinkerbell in Peter Pan? The status of ‘women’ for these ethereal beings feels a bit of a stretch: their ease of flight marks them out as not suffering the same physical limitations as humans. Young sees flight as a fantasy of female liberation: ‘Women who fly want to be ...”

“... area, while taking a more sceptical view of witchcraft. Now Colin Murray, an anthropologist, and Peter Sanders, a historian, provide a study of an earlier panic about medicine murders in the small British colony of Basutoland (now Lesotho) in the late 1940s. They have tracked down all the available records of medicine murder in the colonial period and ...”

“... a believer?’ he asks the dying man. ‘I gave you a Christian name,’ dad replies. ‘He smoked Peter Stuyvesant,’ Mark recalls. ‘His first son’s called Peter after his favourite fag.’ Memory solicits memory. Fill in your own pauses. ‘Wear some new shoes, boys.’ As a youth, doing a paper round, Mark kept out ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as ‘Lefty’), in which the silversmiths of Tula make a life-sized flea out of metal to show Peter the Great they are as skilled as their English counterparts. Whether Benjamin didn’t read the story, or had forgotten the details by the time he wrote about it, he mischaracterises it. They are gunsmiths, not ...”

“... of A.F. Pollard, and so on to John Neale, his pupils and colleagues, and beyond to Peter Lake and John Guy. So often studies of Elizabeth’s reign are impossible to disentangle from the moment when they were written, whether from Victorian and Edwardian confidence in robust parliamentary government, or from post-imperial decline, or the ...”

“... a hit-or-miss physician; Sir Bonus MacScrip, venal member for the borough of Threevotes; Peter Paypaul Paperstamp, the sinecure-seeking poet of Mainchance Villa; Sir Simon Steeltrap, scourge of poachers on his hunting estate at Spring-gun and Treadmill. Some of the names indicate real-life targets such as George Canning, the Tory statesman who ...”

“... possession of properties that have a particular relation to one’s own properties’. I have read and reread these definitions without getting much light on the second one. It is not just that I find sociological prose cloying, but that I have a nasty suspicion that this book is trying to measure the disappearance of something visible only to the eye of ...”

“... essayists and tellers of unpopular truths, and now, spurred by the appearance four years ago of Peter Davison’s marvellously thorough complete edition of Orwell’s writings (and no doubt with an eye on Orwell’s centenary, which falls this year), he has written a short book entirely devoted to telling us, as the title of the US edition has it, ‘Why ...”

“... disguised began during his own lifetime with Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon of 1816. (‘I read Glenarvon too, by Caro Lamb,’ Byron remarked sourly after it was sent to him on the Continent. ‘God damn.’) Mary Shelley herself would contribute several to the list. And they continue to be written. Shelley has received less fictional attention than ...”