Peter Levi – författare

Book by Samuel Johnson, published in 1775. The Journey was the result of a three-month trip to Scotland that Johnson took with James Boswell in 1773. It contains Johnson's descriptions of the customs, religion, education, trade, and agriculture of a society that was new to him. The account in Boswell's diary, published after Johnson's death as The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785), offers an intimate personal record of Johnson's behavior and conversation during the trip.

Book by Samuel Johnson, published in 1775. The Journey was the result of a three-month trip to Scotland that Johnson took with James Boswell in 1773. It contains Johnson's descriptions of the customs, religion, education, trade, and agriculture of a society that was new to him. The account in Boswell's diary, published after Johnson's death as The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785), offers an intimate personal record of Johnson's behavior and conversation during the trip.

Peter Levi teases a remarkably vivid life from Virgil's poems, a life-long study of poetry and the few facts that have come down to us through Suetonius. Born in 70 BC, in a small village near Mantua, Publius Vergilius Maro - Virgil - grew up to be hailed as the greatest Roman poet. And although his work has influenced Western literature for two millennia, little is known about the man himself. Who was the man who created The Aeneid - one of the most important poems in Western literature - and such universal phrases as 'love conquers all' and 'fortune favours the bold'?In this highly acclaimed, now classic biography, the eminent classicist Peter Levi uses Virgil's poems, like the Eclogues, Georgics, and his epic, The Aeneid, as well as historical and archaeological evidence, to discard many of the myths surrounding Virgil's life. In doing so, he uncovers the life of a poet whose powerful imagination and ethereal ability helped shape the epic vision of modern man. Virgil's densely written and beautifully complex verse dominated Augustan Rome, the period of unprecedented prosperity, peace, and expansion that inaugurated the Golden Age of Roman poetry. Virgil was the one poet who most fully understood the Roman Empire's enduring legacy and through his poetry defined the idea of civilization for generations to come. Although contemporary critics and readers often overlook Virgil's genius, Levi demonstrates that to neglect Virgil is to truncate many of the literary foundations of our culture.

"Children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land." - W.H. AudenEdward Lear - beloved nonsense poet, author of such adored poems as The Owl and the Pussycat, inventor of otherworldly characters like Quangle-Wangles and of the modern limerick; lauded artist and illustrator - was a genius who defies classification. Gregarious and popular, Lear had a wide circle of friends, but was often lonely and subject to frequent bouts of depression and debilitating epilepsy, the shame of which he struggled with all his life.In this captivating biography, fellow poet Peter Levi renders descriptions of Lear's sketches and watercolours (of which he painted some 10,000 in the course of his career) and provides incisive portraits of his classic poems, such as The Jumblies, The Owl and the Pussycat and The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, setting them in the wider context of traditional nursery rhymes.Lear belonged to the great tradition of adventurous British travellers, undertaking extensive journeys in Italy and Greece, in Albania, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine and India and these always-eventful journeys are related here, alongside extracts and quotations from his letters and diaries. This is an essential biography for all lovers of this remarkable British literary figure and now recognised as one of the greatest 19th century landscape painters.

Peter Levi teases a remarkably vivid life from Virgil's poems, a life-long study of poetry and the few facts that have come down to us through Suetonius. Born in 70 BC, in a small village near Mantua, Publius Vergilius Maro - Virgil - grew up to be hailed as the greatest Roman poet. And although his work has influenced Western literature for two millennia, little is known about the man himself. Who was the man who created The Aeneid - one of the most important poems in Western literature - and such universal phrases as 'love conquers all' and 'fortune favours the bold'?In this highly acclaimed, now classic biography, the eminent classicist Peter Levi uses Virgil's poems, like the Eclogues, Georgics, and his epic, The Aeneid, as well as historical and archaeological evidence, to discard many of the myths surrounding Virgil's life. In doing so, he uncovers the life of a poet whose powerful imagination and ethereal ability helped shape the epic vision of modern man. Virgil's densely written and beautifully complex verse dominated Augustan Rome, the period of unprecedented prosperity, peace, and expansion that inaugurated the Golden Age of Roman poetry. Virgil was the one poet who most fully understood the Roman Empire's enduring legacy and through his poetry defined the idea of civilization for generations to come. Although contemporary critics and readers often overlook Virgil's genius, Levi demonstrates that to neglect Virgil is to truncate many of the literary foundations of our culture.

'Horace tells us in his poetry almost everything we need to know about his life; it is curiously entangled with the Italian earth, with the history of his times, and an exact moment in that brief early summer of Latin poetry which had no autumn.'The work of the great Roman poet, Horatius Flaccus (65 BC to 8 BC), spanned all aspects of Roman life: politics, the arts, religion, and the authority of the emperor, while his legendary poems (Satires, Odes, Epistles) about friendship, philosophy, love and sex still have widespread appeal.Horace: A Life presents a complete picture of Horace's life and world. It considers the details of Horace's romantic liaisons and why he never married, what the status of his father - a freed man - meant to the poet, and his distinctive brand of philosophy.In this acclaimed biography, Peter Levi - a fellow poet - has produced a thrilling and eminently readable book, the definitive on Rome's greatest poet and the times during which he lived.

In "The Hill of Kronos", Peter Levi paints a radiant portrait of the Greece he came to know through a lifetime of exploration. As a young scholar he sought out its ancient spirit, the keys to its mythology and civilisation, in its ruined cities and majestic mountains. Later, as a priest working as a diplomat and a friend of the oppressed, he lived in Athens through the dark days of the dictatorship. Then the sinews of political life led back to secret alliances made during the civil war and the earlier occupation of Greece, back to murder, starvation and corpse-filled quarries. Lastly, it is seen through the mature eyes of a family man, with the ripened sensibility of an acclaimed poet. This is a precious fusion of experience, a gift of insight from one philhellene to all those who have come to love Greece.