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“... Then in Leviathan, published some years later, Auster uses the same initials for the narrator, Peter Aaron; and anagrammatic sleight of hand (Delia/Lydia, Iris/Siri: Auster’s real-life loves past and present) further blurs the boundaries between his facts and his fictions. So one approaches his openly autobiographical Hand to Mouth with ...”

“... reads as a living-in-the-past, an escape from the brutalities of 15th-century war. In 1984 Maurice Keen, incidentally a strong admirer of Huizinga, showed with conviction in his Chivalry that the mythology of knighthood had a more positive function: that of softening the brutalities. Again, take the witch craze. Obedient to contemporary consensus, Huizinga saw ...”

“... of the Chelsea Press, editor of Flann O’Brien and Oscar Wilde, and the Dublin social historian Peter Costello, should have been inspired to produce a full-length biography of, so to speak, Our Founder. It is in its way a unique undertaking. Hard to think of any other father in the history of literature, more particularly of literature in English, who made ...”

“... Odysseus’ behaviour the night before he slaughters his wife Penelope’s suitors, which Peter Green translates like this: As a man cooking a paunch chockful of fat and blood on a fierce blazing fire will turn it to and fro, determined to get it cooked through as fast as he can, so Odysseus tossed this way and that, trying to work out how he was ...”

“... History of Blacks in Britain was held in the same year, at the University of London. Studies by Peter Fryer, James Walvin and David Dabydeen appeared in the next few years. Fryer, whose Staying Power is still the most detailed – and most often consulted – account of the subject, gave more than two hundred talks and lectures at adult education ...”

“... the state of a culture. Looking back over old copies of the Radio Times, one realises with a keen nostalgia the extent to which the national identity has been embodied in daily sequences of radio and television programmes. Those at the more serious end of the broadcasting spectrum, and their manner of presentation, afford an ideal barometer of cultural ...”

“... golf, women were more or less in at the birth of the game. Mary, Queen of Scots was said to be as keen on it as her son, James, who played at Blackheath when he came south to inherit the crown. Private clubs remained sticky about women becoming members, but might permit them to play inconspicuously at off-peak hours. At Muirfield, the Honourable Company of ...”

“... to be shattered, in due course, was Toynbee’s academic reputation. In the Fifties he encountered keen criticism from academic historians, spearheaded by Pieter Geyl and Hugh Trevor-Roper, which marginalised his major project in the eyes of his own profession. As his new biographer, William McNeill, candidly declares, ‘a principal purpose of this book is to ...”

“... tradition of Praz, Dijkstra and Showalter, as the defining traits of Decadence. Beardsley was not keen on violence of any kind, least of all violence against women. This was not an appropriate subject for a ‘scrumptious’ or ‘adorable’ drawing. It is relevant, of course, that Beardsley flourished at the same time that Freud was recording and ...”

“... pile-up of this magnitude, however much he/we might wish to hail the editorial labours of Peter Davison and his assistants. Davison has been working on this edition for almost twenty years and, as he has not been slow to tell us, has had to overcome a succession of irritating setbacks – mostly to do with the shoddiness and indecisiveness of ...”

“... is a different matter. Uncollected in the Faber anthology is a moment in Michael Wharton’s ‘Peter Simple’ memoir when one of the more heroic Fleet Street pub-performers kept a long-postponed appointment with his doctor. After tapping and humming away, the quack inquired mildly; ‘D’you drink at all?’ Well-primed for the routine, and knowing that ...”

“... president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported both Peter Hall and Peter Brook at a time when their avant-garde work frequently brought storms of criticism. He had a voracious appetite for both English and French literature and liked to hunt down French novels on the Left ...”

“... insecurity and make clear the precariousness of their position on what its current first minister, Peter Robinson of Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, once described as ‘the window ledge of the Union’. A colonial strangeness lurks behind such seemingly familiar phenomena as student drunkenness. Belfast’s Holy Land is an area between Queen’s ...”

“... by patients requesting prescriptions for it, even though they are not in the least mentally ill. Peter Kramer is a bit more cautious, but he does make one seemingly remarkable claim. He asserts that the drug gives people who are unhappy but not depressed (‘dysthymics’ in the esoteric language of psychiatry) great self-confidence and the ability to accept ...”

“... great narrative altarpieces of the Assumption, the Annunciation, the Resurrection and the Death of Peter Martyr. In front of the bare altar below Bellini’s painting in S. Giovanni Crisostomo today, there is a box into which money can be put in order to illuminate the painting by spotlights. Humfrey provides a fuller discussion of the original lighting of ...”