Peter was Professor of English at Kingston University and also taught for two years at the University of Colorado in Boulder, as well as at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. He took early retirement to write free-lance in 1997 and published the authorised biography of Dame Iris Murdoch, chosen by a dozen writers as their Book of the Year in 2001. His other books include Going Buddhist, At the Bright Hem of God : Radnorshire Pastoral, and A Very English Hero : The Making of Frank Thompson. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009 and both his Family Business : a Memoir – chosen as non-fiction Book of the Month in The Book-Seller – and also his A Dictionary of Interesting and Important Dogs – came out in 2019.