Download or read book Mervyn Peake's Vast Alchemies written by G. Peter Winnington and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Winnington follows Peake's life from his birth in China through his student years and a sojourn in an artists' colony on Sark, his marriage and his frustrating years as a soldier when he wished to be a war artist. Yet the 1940s, marked by a traumatic visit to newly liberated Belsen in 1945, were his most productive years. From the middle of the 1950s Parkinson's disease gradually prevented him from working and led to his premature death in 1968. --Book Jacket.