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“... about so great a figure can be wholly irrelevant, but it seems to me that both Mr Reynolds and Mr Griffin have pushed this argument a bit far. When you’ve read these books you will be exempted from ever attending to another word about Hemingway’s home town Oak Park, a posh suburb of Chicago; and although it may seem a little ungracious to say so, for she ...”

“... They are not writing the letters, they are looking at Peter’s yellow hat and red socks. (Exercise 3) Naturally this requires their full attention: the hat, a small but rakish panama being of a brilliant Van Gogh yellow, the socks, blazoned with a griffin rampant, an emphatic, even Risorgimento, red ...”

“... At the beginning​ of Matthew Griffin’s novel, Wendell, his eighty-something narrator, finds his partner collapsed in their garden, face up in the North Carolina sun. Frank will recover from the immediate effects of his stroke, but the book charts his decline into physical debility and dementia, as well as Wendell’s increasingly desperate efforts to care for him ...”

“... of the well-born.’ Those epigrammatic generalisations, from the pens of Paul Veyne and Peter Brown, are fairly typical of the History of Private Life at its best: a book which makes the reader think, teasing and encouraging with spicy details, long views, a capacity for the unexpected insight. Now for something completely different: ‘The goose is ...”

“... possible future careers for them, not intended to mirror reality. For instance, his fictional ‘Peter Morrison’, the decent Conservative MP, has nothing to do with the real-life Peter Morrison MP but was inspired by boyhood memories of the real-life James Prior. The fictional ‘...”

“... citizen, described by Robert Fagles as ‘arguably the finest Classicist of our day’, by Peter Green as one his nation ‘ought to bronze’, and by Jasper Griffin as a man ‘one would like to have as a friend’. In his long career he has written on many subjects: scholarly articles on the heroes of Attic drama ...”

“... arrived in Washington in 1940, returning to London in 1945. That episode, his elder sister Jane Griffin told Thompson, was ‘when it all started’. Griffin, one of the members of the family who sympathised with her parents’ politics, has long made her home in New York. Her account of her childhood and of Lucan’s ...”

“... What does it say about readers of the Kilrush Magazine, for instance, that ‘poetry by Downes, Griffin and Byron’ vied for column inches with ‘articles on the wonders of the turnip’? While admiring the work of retrieval that went into the Irish Academic Press’s recent edition of James Clarence Mangan, I was struck by the fact that a modern edition ...”

“... she encountered that she feared their matches would never strike on her box. My dear old friend Peter Bull, much-missed these days, once had me watching him in Waiting for Godot. I left at half-time under the impression that he didn’t speak in Act Two. ‘What made you think that?’ he demanded when next we met. ‘I thought that was what you ...”

“... writer bristling with contexts. Prynne is mentioned as an enabling presence in Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain’s anthology, Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970, which attempts to reveal to Britain and Ireland a poetic culture it has set to one side. The book contains more than fifty poets, no two of whom are remotely similar, and no more that a ...”

“... she shooed them out of the house: ‘Everybody out,’ she cried, ‘he’s back!’ His son Peter shared Wainwright’s walks when he was a boy. Touching black and white snapshots show him neatly dressed, standing alone in a green trod between limestone walls, dutifully consulting a map. In his fifties he had to retire early, joints swollen with ...”

“... War. In his new book, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, the inordinately prolific and widely admired Peter Gay has much to say about the creativity of the moderns but surprisingly little about their negativity. He conceives of Modernism in older terms as principally an intellectual and artistic grouping bent on liberation rather than as a broader frame of mind ...”

“... history’ (the editors again) but, it sometimes seems, against strong arguments of any kind. Emma Griffin examines the transformation of civic marketplaces to conclude that claims of a Georgian ‘urban renaissance’ are not so much ‘wrong’ as ‘partial’; Joanna Innes cautions against drawing excessively bold conclusions about the growth of government ...”

“... about Hollywood. Larry Levy, an executive in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), tells his rival Griffin Mill that ‘AA meetings are where the best deals are happening.’ The film follows Mill’s wandering but pin-sharp attention as he listens to increasingly bizarre ‘high concept’ story pitches in various bars and restaurants. It’s a scene that ...”

“... bathtub figures towards the end of the poem, when the Trojan hero Hector (as I will call him: Peter Green believes we should eradicate the familiar Roman equivalents for Homer’s names, so he calls him Hektōr) has been killed by Achilles (and, phew, Green calls him Achilles rather than Akhilleus: two cheers for inconsistency). Hector’s ...”