Peter Dann
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peterdannauthor.com
Peter Dann
@peterdannauthor.com
Author of coming-of-age novel “1961”. Former screenwriter, technical writer. Reads for Librivox (inc. Stendhal, Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Mansfield). Location: Australia.
https://peterdannauthor.com
Couldn’t say yes. Couldn’t say sorry. So appropriate Senator Prince is now spokesperson for absolutely nothing.
September 10, 2025 at 9:04 AM
Noddle-head decides he is a knight-errant, and asks local farm labourer to accompany him. Cervantes milks his premise with great skill, creating much warm-hearted silliness and slapstick. My free reading is now at librivox.org/don-quixote-...
September 2, 2025 at 12:48 AM
And while you’re at it:
🪝Dangle your modifiers like a Tyburn executioner
July 1, 2025 at 8:18 AM
Did Nicholas John Turner anticipate publishers might turn down his marvellous yet challenging Let The Boys Play? It so happens his working title THY SONS MAKE PILLAGE (from Titus Andronicus) is an anagram of NO SHALT LIKE MY PAGES.
June 9, 2025 at 11:25 PM
If there is any justice in the cosmos, Donald Trump will be required to spend eternity bound to a card table playing poker with Volodymyr Zelensky. Let's see then who's better at counting cards.
June 2, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Silly me. Whether or not THY SONS MAKE PILLAGE (the original title of Nicholas Turner's "Let the Boys Play") is a decipherable anagram, it is certainly from Act 2 Scene 3 of Shakespeare's gore-fest Titus Andronicus. Philomel's tongue turns up in LTBP on p. 84. @thebookdesk.bsky.social
May 24, 2025 at 8:52 AM
If LET THY SONS MAKE PILLAGE (original title of Nicholas John Turner’s “Let the Boys Play”) is in fact an anagram, solution GAS KILLS NEOPHYTE MA would at least fit content of last chapter. (This might-or-might-not-be puzzle is driving me nuts!) @thebookdesk.bsky.social
May 23, 2025 at 11:59 PM
Question 1, children: The gap under a bridge is 4 metres. You are driving a van which is 5 metres tall…
May 21, 2025 at 11:05 PM
From "Let the Boys Play", by John Nicholas Turner (p. 41). I now think we may have an anagram here. LAST GAME KILLS NEOPHYTE? LAST NEOPHYTE GAME SKILL? Are there any other "solvers" out there working on this intriguing novelistic escape room? @thebookdesk.bsky.social
May 20, 2025 at 12:44 AM
So, should I, or should I not…

… celery sacrifice?
April 18, 2025 at 2:11 AM
My day is now officially “made”.
April 9, 2025 at 5:16 AM
If there was one thing Jonathan Swift loved more dearly than a good poop or a kind horse, it was skewering the foibles and pride of his fellow man. My free reading of Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” is now available at librivox.org/gullivers-tr...
April 7, 2025 at 1:08 AM
This guy’s already fabricated one Golden Dome. Now he wants another??
March 23, 2025 at 12:23 AM
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver views a means by which "the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study." Sound familiar?
March 14, 2025 at 6:38 AM
George Borrow's "The Romany Rye" (1857) continues "Lavengro" to form a highly readable work whose mingling of fiction, travelogue, autobiography and invective now sounds strangely contemporary. My new (free) reading is at librivox.org/the-romany-r...
March 4, 2025 at 11:04 PM
The term “politically correct” did not exist when George Borrow published “The Romany Rye” in 1857, but he certainly suspected that contemporary authors might be drawn to promote certain positions on account of their modish popularity.
February 22, 2025 at 3:59 AM
Hungarian equerry addressing narrator of "The Romany Rye", by George Borrow, who prose Gerald Murnane so admires. As it happens, I've actually seen the cribs bearing English on one side, Hungarian on the other, in a certain filing cabinet in Goroke. Just coincidence?
February 6, 2025 at 10:44 PM
Caligula's horse had more gravitas between its hind legs than the great statesmen named in the first line of this bizarre headline today.
February 6, 2025 at 7:38 AM
Around when Gerald Murnane turned 10, his father's gambling debts caused great upheaval in his family. Here, in George Borrow's "The Romany Rye", "the jockey" describes a similar situation. Murnane admired Borrow's prose style — but may have had other grounds for sympathy too?
February 4, 2025 at 10:14 PM
Was Gerald Murnane influenced by George Borrow beyond admiring his style? In "Romany Rye", the narrator discusses Hungarian history at length with a Hungarian to whom he has just sold a horse. Hungary looms large in "Inland", and Murnane taught himself Hungarian. Co-incidence?
February 2, 2025 at 2:48 AM
“The witch hunt” is one of the most exciting (and terrifying) episodes in H. Rider Haggard’s “King Solomon’s Mines”. Posting this today, within 24 hours of the Washington air disaster, for no particular reason at all…
January 30, 2025 at 9:51 PM
Wow! So this is what true leadership looks like, huh?
January 30, 2025 at 9:08 AM
With this critical observation concerning his central character Dominic, is Martin Boyd kissing a blythe farewell to half his potential readership? From “When Blackbirds Sing”.
January 18, 2025 at 2:36 AM
A young (English) turd evaluating the prospect of marrying and taking “home” a young Australian woman circa 1912, in Martin Boyd’s mostly sedate but occasionally LOL funny “Outbreak of Love”.
January 12, 2025 at 7:56 AM
For all his emphasis on the “wit” of the Langton family, Martin Boyd’s Guy Langton himself rarely shows the sharpish form of wit evident here. From “Outbreak of Love”.
December 29, 2024 at 10:11 PM