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“... the SWP had recruited various politicians and celebrities to an Anti-Nazi League. They included Peter Hain, an anti-apartheid activist who was now working for the postal workers’ union and had recently joined the Labour Party; Neil Kinnock, an up-and-coming Welsh MP from the party’s far left; and the actress Miriam Karlin, famous for playing a bolshie ...”

“... been incorrectly diagnosed and of the wrong answers half had come from specialists in cardiology. Peter Fleming’s absorbing history does not contain this sobering information, but then it stops at 1970 – and on an upbeat note, with the introduction of cyclosporin, the immunosuppressant drug, and an improved outlook for heart transplant patients. What ...”

“... rejection of Europe, there was consternation: Britain’s relations with the EU were on the line. Peter Mandelson, horrified at the implications – he styled himself Minister for Looking Ahead – was sure that this all resulted from leaving him out of the loop. Blair was alerted and asked Whelan what had happened. Whelan told him that the report merely ...”

“... he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an autobiography, and died a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... convinced that Wilson was a Russian agent and he conveyed this certainty to Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Arthur Martin took on board Angleton’s ‘certainty’ that Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson’s predecessor as leader of the Labour Party, had been poisoned by the Russians so that Wilson could take over the Labour leadership. This fantastic nonsense has ...”

“... Afrikaans genres such as the plaasroman (‘farm-novel’), or the founding authority of Robinson Crusoe, or the bankrupt ideals of the epistolary form, Coetzee’s books set out to provincialise the novel by taking on its pretensions and conventions in a spirit of Erasmian (and Joycean) jocoseriousness. That this is not an emptying gesture of ...”

“... that any incriminating letters survive: Dickens’s son Henry and Ellen Ternan’s son Geoffrey Robinson destroyed all such correspondence. Dickens himself burned any personal letters that he could come by. He also destroyed his diaries at the end of every year. One diary – that for 1867 – was lost or, more likely, stolen in America. It resurfaced in ...”

“... that side of the Atlantic, without ever managing to communicate his whereabouts to anyone at home. Peter Ackroyd’s Milton in America (1996) seems curiously, if perhaps unconsciously, parasitic on this earlier extravaganza. Milton, however, despite some fleeting fictional attention from Robert Graves, has never been able to vie with the Romantics in this ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel is partly a narrative, partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors. It is an important and a depressing book, its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel ...”

“... life have invented forms of rhetoric which have to be read in a new way. These are President Mary Robinson, Provisional Sinn Fein, John Hume and the British Government. The ‘not’ factor does not help us to read Mary Robinson. She is a political idealist, and saying the opposite of what she means would not appeal to ...”

“... aie? ‘Half the poetry of the 18th century is probably written by him,’ a character says in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton. Yet he appeals equally to defenders and opponents of the canon. Chatterton was convinced of his own talent and ambitious to be recognised as one of the great English poets; but he chose to attract public attention with pastiche ...”

“... it in his three big notebooks bought for 18/6 at ‘the Press Office in Smith Street’ in St Peter Port); but also ‘of’ in the sense of ‘made into’. It is Ebenezer made into a book. (Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude comes to mind, with its paper-baler who is finally baled up himself.) William Golding put it admirably when he said: ‘To ...”

“... and more. In his preface he thanks Adorno, Henry Nash Smith, I.A. Richards, Talcott Parsons and Peter Laslett, among others. The standard caricature of the Cambridge-influenced criticism of the postwar years represents it as blunderingly empirical and cosily parochial: these stereotypes wilt and shrivel when confronted by Watt’s ambitious, analytical and ...”

“... was produced in 1758, Alzuma in 1773. And while we are on the drama, let us remember James Robinson Planché, born in Piccadilly, London on 27 February 1796, who is part of the Romantic Period and inventor of the Christmas pantomime. The list of his plays runs to over 150 items, and his entry to seven pages. (Shakespeare gets five and a half.) This ...”