Peter Stansky
Daniel Snowman meets the historian of British culture from William Morris, via Bloomsbury, to the Beatles.
It is a truth universally admitted that we all speak badly of others, even of those of whom we may in fact be quite fond.’
You have to warm to a historian who is prepared to embed such a sentiment in the midst of a learned treatise about the Bloomsbury Group. But Peter Stansky’s writing, like his conversation, is full of colour, personality, flair and the Higher Gossip. Professor of History at Stanford for over thirty years, Stansky’s own educational credentials include degrees from Yale, Cambridge and Harvard. At seventy, he can look back on a stream of articles and books, many written in close collaboration with the late William (‘Billy’) Abrahams, on some of the seminal figures in British political and cultural history from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth: Gladstone, William Morris, the ‘Bloomsburyites’, George Orwell, Henry Moore, Benjamin Britten.
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