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“... life – emblematically, almost mythologically – sets out challenges faced by many writers. Peter Alexander’s biography, Les Murray: A Life in Progress (2000), is a volume every poet and aspiring poet should buy, filch or borrow. Having first met Murray in 1985, I filched it almost as soon as it was published (and draw on it here). The most arresting ...”

“... he wrote The Corrections and Freedom – two internationally bestselling epics of middle-class white America struggling with marriage, parenthood, illness and climate change – and his two earlier, somewhat disavowed systems novels. Thirty years ago he was just a Swarthmore student abroad in what was still West Berlin, exploring his vices and ...”

“... philosophy of Adam Smith. Those were the days (to paraphrase Todd Gitlin) when the right got the White House and the left got the English departments, where the Enlightenment was seen as quaint at best and as the source of Western claims to superiority at worst. The battles of the 1980s dimly echoed those waged over the Enlightenment during the Weimar ...”

“... Old Man’s a Dustman’ because it meant I could sing in Cockney . . . I liked ‘Little White Bull’ for the same Cockneyphile reasons . . . I liked Rosemary Clooney’s ‘This Old House’ . . . I loved ‘Dem Bones Dem Bones (Dem Dry Bones)’, for reasons that had nothing to do with the words. One is reminded of the joke about the Oxford ...”

“... no coincidence that the first objects that fall from the incised stomachs of captured sharks in Peter Benchley’s Jaws are car parts: as Benchley points out at the novel’s outset, like some grotesque über-car the great white must perpetually keep moving. My sister then held up as evidence The Founding and Manifesto of ...”

“... especially his first wife, Dorothy, whom (rather unimaginatively) he both idolised (she is his ‘White Soul’) and repeatedly betrayed. Unfortunately, we don’t learn much about Dorothy herself; for all we know she was enjoying her own semi-detached husband in Dulwich during Harry’s frequent absences. There are a few hints, in Morton’s books, of his ...”

“... had worked earlier, Pevsner contributed a series called ‘Treasure Hunt’ under the pseudonym Peter F.R. Donner (in theory, to disguise how much of every issue he was writing himself). Still very much the architectural historian, with his references to the style of decorative motifs and examination of plan types, he turned his attention to everyday ...”

“... the stones, and it is left behind … He was gone, like a meteor, almost as soon as he appeared. Peter Campbell described Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway of 1844 as an exercise in ‘the poetry of speed’ (LRB, 3 June 2004). Rookwood was written a decade earlier. The Great Western was yet to be built; work on the London and ...”

“... briefly flirted half-heartedly with Mosley’s British Union of Fascists herself. ‘Prod’ – Peter Rodd, her quite fabulously dull husband – ‘looked very pretty in his black shirt,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh years later, ‘but we were younger and high-spirited then, and didn’t know about Buchenwald.’ Fans of Nancy Mitford have her novels, her ...”

“... voice. She has, typically, been at once an outsider and a supremely political animal – a white radical in conservative 1940s Rhodesia; in the 1960s, a bitingly reluctant figurehead for the women’s movement; a disenchanted Red who retains a primarily sociological understanding of the individual; a colonial writer edgily occupying a position of ...”

“... political views for granted, however. He could be equally difficult with Stalinists. And when Peter Hain’s group, Stop the Seventy Tour, led local anti-apartheid activists to dig up the cricket pitch in the Oxford Parks so as to sabotage the university match against the Springboks, Hodgkin was asked over and over again to sign a petition to get the ...”

“... edition, with its alternately haunting and embarrassing photomontages and a fine introduction by Peter Porter, is a perfect invitation to rereading. There are many people who are sure the Quartet is a masterpiece of some sort, however patchy; and there are people who are sure it’s not a masterpiece because they find it unreadable. I have, at different ...”

“... supported the same football teams, and wore the same aftershave. Meanwhile, Adam Ant painted a white stripe across his face and sported more lip gloss than Madonna.Transgression isn’t for everyone, but it tempts the future. A lot of the electronic bands of that period dealt in a kind of transgressive yearning, seeming to feel homesick for somewhere that ...”

“... The Fate of Rome (2017). The barbarians, meanwhile, have made a distinct comeback, since Peter Heather made a spirited case for their share of responsibility in The Fall of the Roman Empire (2005). Douglas Boin proposes another topical solution, blaming neither barbarians nor Romans but the relationship between them. One of the most important ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university ...”