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“... whose glinting eyes, in Reynolds’s 1778 portrait, stare fixedly past us from the dust-jacket of Peter Martin’s biography. Indeed the book’s steady prose, for all its professions of admiration, does little to suggest that Martin (the first writer to undertake a life of Malone since 1860) has managed to muster much ...”

“... art with life by imagining him thinking, speaking and writing in perfect print-ready copy. Peter Martin’s introduction to the tercentenary edition of Selected Writings sets up an echo chamber of affirmations of Johnson’s eternal appeal ranging from Ruskin to Beckett to Seamus Heaney to that American avatar of Johnson, Harold Bloom, who places ...”

“... revolutionary wheeled in a pram – Speakers’ Corner meant more to me Than did the statue of Peter Pan. The first theatre I ever saw The inside of was the Unity; Lenin and Stalin were nursery gods And at night behind the curtain There were meetings, meetings, meetings. At nursery school (Methodist, Kingsway Hall) I came across gentle Jesus meek and mild ...”

“... Peter Vansittart, novelist, historian and writer for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself defeated ...”

“... Angleton became convinced that Wilson was a Russian agent and he conveyed this certainty to Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Arthur Martin took on board Angleton’s ‘certainty’ that Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson’s predecessor as leader of the Labour Party, had been poisoned by the Russians ...”

“... I begin to write about John Martin: Apocalypse (at Tate Britain until 15 January) before looking at the pictures. Maybe, I say to myself, if I set memories of Martin’s pictures against the words in the catalogue (Tate, £19.99), if I learn what he achieved in more than a century and a half of (variable) success, I’ll find that we owe his memory some kind of apology ...”

“... romantic affair of opposing powers. There is inevitably nothing in Richler’s book, either, from Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow. Amis, too, was born in 1949, and one of the critical objections raised against his novel was that he hadn’t lived through the events which he seemed to be treating so cavalierly. You can see what was meant by this, but the ...”

“... Since I am about to comment on other people’s published reactions to Martin Amis’s novel Other People, it seems right to state in summary form my own feelings on the main matters that divided the reviewers. I thought it a remarkable work, highly readable and enjoyable, not incomprehensible or unduly difficult ...”

“... a term which is prominent on the title-page of the account of the case published in 1561. Martin Guerre was a peasant, of Basque origin but settled in the village of Artigat in the French South-West, between Toulouse and Foix. He married a local girl, Bertrande de Rols, when they were in their early teens; ten years later, he disappeared. Eight years ...”

“... it.A natural history of such uneasy tussles, some vocal, some unspoken, could be illustrated from Martin Parr’s work. His pictures can be seen both at the Barbican until 14 April and in the well-made book which accompanies the exhibition. They can be read as a recapitulation of the history of the unsolicited photograph: a history which begins with the first ...”

“... hit the same sweetly rasping note as Tish Murtha’s unemployed man and his family in Newcastle, Martin Parr’s empty, rained-on tables for a Jubilee street party, Tony Ray-Jones’s group on deckchairs making the best of a cold day on Brighton Beach, Homer Sykes’s naked girls in a fairground peepshow. They all say ‘this is how we are,’ in black and ...”

“... etchings and lithographs do, the result is a commentary on, rather than a pictorial realisation of Peter Pan, Mother Goose or Jane Eyre. The prints are not part of the exhibition but are illustrated in Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work.*In Rego’s work collaboration has an unusually broad meaning, and includes printers and galleries (invitations to do ...”

“... in work which addresses ‘the challenge of the inadequacy and “belatedness” of painting’. Martin Kippenberger died young eight years ago. He managed to be doubly transgressive when he went Warhol and hired a company which specialised in painting cinema posters to produce pictures including a number of self-portraits and ‘completely clichéd images ...”

“... something of a reputation as Leftists. The two officers at the centre of this molehunt were Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Wright was a brilliant scientist and a grammar-school patriot who always doubted the patriotism of his public-school superiors. He held extreme right-wing views. His devotion to rooting out Lefties at ...”

“... of wealthy Americans (Widener, Frick, Morgan, Altman and Marquand). The Dutch art historian Willem Martin, in the introduction to a monograph of 1901, almost apologised for giving time to the work. Like Joshua Reynolds, he said, he turned from Dou ‘with admiration on the lips but indifference in the heart’.This is the story told by Arthur Wheelock in his ...”