Peter Parker

In the spring of 1945 three men pooled their resources in order to buy Long Crichel House, a former rectory built during the reign of Queen Anne in a secluded Dorset village. Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Edward Sackville-West were highly influential music critics, while Eardley Knollys, a former gallery owner, was now assistant secretary to the

Shirley Hazzard was in her late twenties when, in 1959, somewhat diffidently, she submitted her first short story to the New Yorker. It was, William Maxwell remembered, ‘an astonishment to the editors, because it was the work of a finished literary artist about whom they knew nothing whatever’, and he immediately accepted it for publication.

Just after John Pearson finished writing The Profession of Violence, his celebrated biography of the Krays, both his and his agent’s officeswere broken into. Letters from Lord Boothby to Ronnie Kray had disappeared, as had a copy of the book’s manuscript. Pearson then received a telephone call from the high-powered lawyer Lord Goodman, who warned

When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus, friends asked why he didn’t instead do the Grand Tour. ‘Every blockhead does that,’ Banks replied. ‘My Grand Tour shall be one round the whole globe.’ It was a wise decision, and his

Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait with a Sunflower’. It probably symbolises the radiant majesty of the painter’s patron, Charles I, but for Van Gogh the sunflower ‘embodied and shouted out yellow, the colour of light, warmth and happiness’. In the

Cedric Morris is often referred to as an artist-plantsman, and while as a breeder of plants, most particularly of irises, he has always been highly regarded in horticultural circles, his reputation as a painter has been subject to regular fluctuations. Last year, two excellent and complementary London exhibitions — Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman at the

In 1979, despite the best efforts of scientists for more than a century, a butterfly called the British Large Blue became extinct. There is widespread concern about the more recent decline in butterfly populations, but the American ecologist Nick Haddad writes that the collective weight of the known populations of the five rarest butterflies he

The title of Matthew Dennison’s new biography of the man who wrote The Wind in the Willows appears to nod to another children’s classic of the Edwardian period. J.M. Barrie subtitled Peter Pan — first staged in 1904, four years before the publication of Kenneth Grahame’s book — ‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’, and

Objectivity seems to be difficult for historians writing about Britain’s long and complicated relationship with India, and this makes the even-handedness David Gilmour achieves in books such as The Ruling Caste both unusual and welcome. In his enlightening and wonderfully detailed new portrait of The British in India, he states that he is ‘not seeking

Edward Lear liked to tell the story of how he was once sitting in a railway carriage with two women who were reading aloud to children from his Book of Nonsense. When a male passenger confidently asserted that ‘There is no such person as Edward Lear’, the writer was obliged to prove his own existence

George Orwell’s suggestion that the British remember only the military disasters of the first world war is certainly being borne out by the centenary commemorations. The focus of each year so far has been Gallipoli, the Somme and now the Third Battle of Ypres, popularly known as Passchendaele. The basic story is familiar. On 31

On the Whitsun weekend of 1935 an art student called Denton Welch was knocked off his bicycle by a car and suffered catastrophic injuries, including a fractured spine. Although he made a remarkable partial recovery, he subsequently endured regular bouts of disabling illness, and would die in 1948 aged only 33. Welch continued to paint

My novel of the year was What Belongs to You (Picador, £12.99), Garth Greenwell’s slender, poised, clear-eyed and devastating account of the depths to which unrequited sexual obsession can lead you, particularly if you become entangled with a rent-boy in Sofia. I also enjoyed and admired Aravind Adiga’s funny and touching Selection Day (Picador, £16.99), in which cricketing prodigies

The ten pallbearers at Thomas Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey on 16 January 1928 included Kipling, Barrie, Housman, Gosse, Galsworthy, Shaw and both the prime minister and leader of the oppposition. This distinguished gathering was not strictly necessary for the job at hand, because Hardy’s coffin merely contained his ashes — all that there was

In the final months of 1914, medical officers on the Western Front began seeing a new kind of casualty. Soldiers who had no physical injury were displaying a wide range of alarming symptoms. Some appeared to be completely dazed or were shaking uncontrollably, others had lost their sense of taste or smell, or were suffering

‘July 1st 1916 was the most interesting day of my life,’ Philip Howe recalled, with characteristic English dryness, half a century after taking part in the most catastrophic 24 hours in the history of the British army. Howe had been a lieutenant in the 10th West Yorkshires, which had the grim distinction of losing more

In August 1915, in his tent at GHQ on the Aegean island of Imbros, General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander-in-chief of the Gallipoli expedition, woke from a dream in which someone was attempting to drown him in the Hellespont. ‘For hours afterwards,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I was haunted by the thought that the Dardanelles

Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh (1876–1948) had a heritage as confusing as her name. Her father was a deposed Indian maharajah who had been exiled to England, her mother the Cairo-born illegitimate daughter of a German merchant and an Abyssinian slave. The young princess was brought up in considerable splendour on a vast Suffolk estate