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“... Perhaps it is unEnglish of me to find all this unfunny. After Williams’s poison-brew, Peter Benson goes down like dry white wine. Yet The Other Occupant is a lesser book than the novel he published last year, A Lesser Dependency, both in the sense of being less ambitious and less well-written. A Lesser Dependency set out both to document and ...”

“... line pursued its course through astonishing convolutions to its own unpredictable end.’ In Peter Benson’s second novel, A Lesser Dependency, the plotting is less intricate and the end less unpredictable, while there is little pressure to reconciliation. Rather than the complex and centuries-long colonial dispossession of the Irish by the ...”

“... Young, who died recently, was deputy head of MI6 until he joined the merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson in 1961. One of the very few revelations in George Blake’s book is a memorandum which George Young circulated among his admiring agents in the mid-Fifties. It starts by castigating the ‘ceaseless talk’ about the ‘spread of democratic ...”

“... James does this particularly well with the coastal landscape of Suffolk around Aldeburgh – Peter Grimes country. Then it is time for the ‘nicely managed crescendo’. And then it is time for bed. No doubt it is partly because of the proximity of bed (it is from his own bedroom that he has emerged with his spidery manuscript and the single candle) and ...”

“... of decisive incidents, both familiar and sombre: the Notting Hill Riots of 1958; Tory candidate Peter Griffiths winning Smethwick six years later with the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’; Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in 1968; the New Cross fire of 1981 which killed 13 young black men and women; the riots in St ...”

“... V. Prochnow Jr, with 65 entries by Prochnow senior; and in Quotations For Our Time, by Dr Laurence Peter (author of The Peter Principle), with 37 entries of his own. It’s not wholly a new conceit: even L. T. Hoyt, last century, was not so unjust to himself as to deny his own verses comparison with those of Tennyson and ...”

“... made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the globe. Peter Firstbrook’s book is written from a very English perspective, Ghosts of Everest from a very American one: neither takes up the really important issues. The Last Climb began life as a history of all the early Everest expeditions but, once Mallory’s body ...”

“... 24 years after Shakespeare’s death. That edition, however, involved wholesale revision. John Benson, the publisher, capitalising on the undiminished sales of Venus and Adonis, produced a volume of what looked to be not old-fashioned sonnets but new Shakespeare love poems. The transformation involved both format and erotics: many of the sonnets are run ...”

“... he still boasts, of George Kennedy Young, an MI6 agent who became deputy chairman of Kleinwort Benson. James describes Young as ‘a brave man’ who ‘knew the difference between good and evil’. In fact, Young was a racist of a pretty poisonous variety who never let his business or intelligence connections get in the way of his public campaigning to ...”

“... the spirit of the age. In 1904, influenced by Max Nordau’s theories of racial degeneration, A.C. Benson ascribed the pervasive Tennysonian gloom to a strain of ‘dark Southern blood’ tainting the predominantly Scandinavian stock of the family. In 1923, Harold Nicolson, persuaded by Strachey’s sardonic view of eminent Victorians, diagnosed Tennyson as a ...”

“... for a reversal, a stress on earthly powers, a resurrection of ET through childish belief, as in Peter Pan or Ordet. As it is, neither the script nor the shooting of this sequence draw on the dividends accumulated in the earlier parts of the film. The sense of strain is felt most clearly in the closing sequence. Spielberg obviously hoped to achieve an ...”

“... by MI5 – the first evidence of that MI5 subversion of the Wilson Government dealt with by famous Peter Wright. Lady Falkender and Wilson had urged Goldsmith to sue – Marnham had unwittingly libelled him by saying he was at John Aspinall’s lunch to decide what to do if Lucky turned up. And so on. Goldsmith is discredited, loses a peerage, fails to buy a ...”

“... Ireland Secretary after a mass break-out of Republican prisoners from the Maze prison, and Peter Brooke failed in a more recent attempt to leave the same office after he had sung a song on a television chat show in the Republic of Ireland, hours after seven people had been killed in a particularly bad atrocity in the Province. While ministers have been ...”

“... taking the exam except that my friend (and alphabetical neighbour on the school register) Albert Benson passed it with me but was too poor to go on to what we then called secondary school.As it was put together, the programme tended to confirm Anthony Powell’s thesis that documentaries aren’t based on the evidence but are simply scenarios dreamed up by ...”

“... second time I saw him must have been a few years later at the Mermaid Theatre at a performance of Peter Luke’s play Hadrian VII with Alec McCowen. Then it was his characteristic walk that I noticed: he tripped down the aisle after the designer, Gladys Calthrop, his hands, fingers pressed together, half slipped into his trouser pockets ...”