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“... a dodgy stockbroker? Yes, it was the man in the runcible hat, Edward Lear. His latest biographer, Peter Levi, confides to us that, like Lear’s mother, his own grandmother also had 21 children. Easily lured into digression, Levi adds that ‘it is not uncommon in such families that by some mysterious compensation of ...”

“... inheritance from Petronius Arbiter, Peacock and Aldous Huxley, with a soupçon of Firbank. Peter Levi, who was a friend of Connolly’s and married his widow, has brought the tale to an ending, making his task possible by briskly disposing of all the clues Connolly himself had perhaps despaired of explaining in the last section. ‘I do not ...”

“... a quotation from one of them, is if anything worse.) After this, it is a relief to learn from Peter Levi’s lively and delightful biography that Dr Zhivago (Dr Alive) was a name Pasternak had seen on the cover of a Moscow manhole, rather as Dickens claimed to have spotted a Copperfield and a Chuzzlewit on the signs of poor London shops. Quite apart ...”

“... sings with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we must praise and praise again. Peter Levi, alas, is one of those dwindling, disinterested Arnoldians who can still be uncovered in the home of lost causes. Last year he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford and in his inaugural lecture announced: ‘Today is the feast of Crispinus and ...”

“... Evans compares McEnroe to Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, with quotations from Shakespeare and from Peter Levi on Shakespeare. He uses adjectives like ‘pavonine’, and describes McEnroe’s style as pointilliste – rather a good idea, except that it leads to an analysis of pointillism: ‘tiny jabs of colour executed with the deft touch of a true ...”

“... and assessment, and they are generously illustrated with quotations, many of them in Greek. Peter Levi’s history purposes to give ‘a short lucid description in easy, continuous prose of most of ancient Greek literature’. The description is again accompanied by critical reflections and illustrated by frequent quotations (all in English ...”

“... admit that, while telling a good story, his biography offers little close reading of the poems. Peter Levi’s Tennyson is particularly strong in this department; ‘Poetry is what makes him mysterious,’ he tells us. Levi’s long first section, ‘The Birth of the Poet’, is an illuminating investigation of ...”

“... in The Art of Edward Thomas open out the issues, but a whiff of poet’s corner lingers on. Pace Peter Levi, it is not quite enough to celebrate Thomas as ‘certainly genuine, authentic, a true poet’. Under Storm’s Wing is a welcome reprint of Helen Thomas’s As it was and World without End, first published in 1926 and 1931. It also contains a ...”

“... spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he ...”

“... that one of the first issues the paper has chosen to take a stand on is the wretched case made by Peter Levi for the wretched poems which the paper went with him in attributing to Shakespeare. Those I know who have become regular readers praise its journalistic craftsmanship in much the same terms as I would praise its design: it makes useful information ...”

“... the son of her SPD colleague Clara Zetkin, an idealistic young man 15 years her junior; with Peter Levi, her defence counsel in a spectacular political trial – they had a brief and intense affair in 1914; and Hans Diefenbach, the doctor with whom she conducted her ‘last romantic affair’ in her letters from prison. Newly discovered letters ...”

“... did not fit into traditional pigeon-holes must be up to no good. The same idea seems to underlie Peter Abelard’s bold attempt, discussed by Le Goff in another essay, to assimilate university teachers to knights, describing arguments as weapons and disputations as battles or tournaments. He was trying to legitimate his own profession and incidentally to ...”

“... Weidenfeld’s publicity director – more parties, more delicious food to catalogue. She marries Peter, who has ‘the most seductive voice on earth’ (everyone turns out to be the most, the best at everything). They move to New York and struggle to conceive until, ‘barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen – I had finally been allowed into ...”

“... of academic life in general, but one can guess at more particular reasons. Not long ago Sir Peter Medawar remarked that when the momentous DNA discoveries were being made there were plenty of people in the English faculties of universities quite as clever as Crick and Watson – but Crick and Watson had something to be clever about. For the last thirty ...”

“... as in the immense, neo-Darwinian undertaking of Stephen Jay Gould, the books of Lewis Wolpert, Peter Medawar’s essays, the psychiatric narratives of Oliver Sacks or the clinical deliberations of Sherwin Nuland; and finally the heroic attempts to describe a single discipline, including its technical details and particular kind of reasoning. For inclusion ...”