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“... the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people ...”

“... from his Utopia. Even so, it had been Erasmus who had given him letters to friends such as Peter Giles, dedicatee of Utopia, in Antwerp and it was Erasmus who saw to the publication of Lucian, the epigrams and Utopia, bustling about to secure commendatory letters and so enhance them. Erasmus also coined and disseminated the description ‘a man for all ...”

“... begins with a famous largo, ‘Shade as it never was’ (Ombra mai fu), sung by the self-same King of Kings to his beloved: a plane tree. Aelian, a collector of amazing historical facts, provides the fullest account of this bizarre episode: That Xerxes fellow was a clown … he was slavishly devoted to a plane tree, as if the tree was something to be ...”

“... provides an audio commentary. And there are lots of educational backups, some, like lectures by Peter Ackroyd and Tom Paulin, now over, others, including various conferences and courses, still to come. The most visible, and in some ways the most instructive of the exhibits are those which demonstrate Blake’s technical innovations. Only one of his ...”

“... names Brancusi gave them often announce or imply religious themes: The Spirit of Buddha, The King of Kings, The Prodigal Son, The Wisdom of the Earth.) In two projects – one complete, the Tîirgu-Jiu complex in Romania, and another un-realised, ‘The Temple of Deliverance’ in Indore – Brancusi planned sculptural groups which night be reckoned to ...”

“... and Kay, Barroll and de Grazia and Razzell all made me think again about a life I thought I knew. Peter Razzell’s is the slightest of these three books, but it makes two important contributions to any reading of William Shakespeare’s life in Stratford. First, it places the career of William’s father John in the larger contexts of Stratford’s economic ...”

“... But Margaret Pole, one of the great magnates of Tudor England, is not overlooked. In The King’s Curse (2014) she was ground up by the great fictionalising machine that is Philippa Gregory, and in 2003 she was the subject of a major biography by Hazel Pierce: Margaret Pole: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership. Pierce’s book is thorough and ...”

“... at Baalbek. The surrounding buildings are higher than they were when the church was built, but King George shows clear above the roof line, just as he does in Hogarth’s Gin Lane. All in all, the design of the church is majestic – original, strange and energetic. But from the office window we could see that weeds had found a foothold in the ...”

“... add: ‘Why did gold become money in the first place?’ Or: ‘Will gold ever be money again?’ Peter Bernstein’s history of gold as money is very much better at answering the first question than the other two. Pecuniary anthropology is very, very perilous. In the absence of evidence, both Aristotle and Adam Smith made implausible conjectures about the ...”

“... but Be’) The poem switches between dredged-up confessions (‘I did it, I myself, killing the King my father’) and jokes faster than any audience could keep up with. The brackets around ‘(seriously though)’ epitomise the poem’s tone: that moment when the comedian draws the breathless audience together and they don’t know whether they’ve been ...”

“... fifty or sixty thousand. The 17th and 18th-century poor, in the days when Britain constituted what Peter Linebaugh has called a thanatocracy, are uncommemorated, as are the apprentices, the economic migrants and the vagrants who were hanged for trifling crimes against property. Even the infamous victims remain unnamed. There is no mention of Jack Sheppard, the ...”

“... of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity.’ Nancy Mitford, although persuaded by her husband, Peter Rodd, to don a black shirt and gush in print on behalf of TPOF (The Poor Old Führer), was already marshalling the Union Jack Shirts for her novel Wigs on the Green. But it was not until 1938 that P.G. Wodehouse brought on Sir Roderick Spode and his Black ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... safer with a fifty-year-old President. Other stock characters are borrowed from fiction, notably King Solomon’s Mines, which D.M. Thomas read with interest when he was a small boy in Australia. Like other boys, he wondered what sort of quarterdeck language Commander Good used when he was swearing at Zulus and whether he responded erotically to the devotion ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”