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“... and nipped in there. Halfway down the corridor, I was looking for a john and who do I see but Philip Roth. “Hey, Philip, what you doin’ here?” “Oh, I had to pee,” Roth said. “Happens to me all the time,” I said. “You just have to pee.” The previous week I went to see my daughter in Brooklyn and I ...”

“... sequence of letters between a farmhand, Emily Chitticks, and her sweetheart, Private Will Martin; five of the 23 letters she wrote were returned, inscribed KILLED. In one, she told him: ‘I have dreamt that you were back home with me dear and the most strange thing about them, you are always in civilian clothes when I dream of you & and I have never ...”

“... into the commonest crevasse in Irish family life – the priesthood’. Later, Brennan wrote about Martin and Delia Bagot, whose daughters are based on Maeve and her younger sister. To read The Springs of Affection is to allow 48 Cherryfield Avenue to become part of your mind: the narrow staircase with its wine-red runner, the panel of brass around the ...”

“... Hollywood, who realises that for someone that mean and tough there can be no permanent cure. Since Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1975) the Vietnam vet on the rampage has cropped up so frequently in American mythology he has become an icon of the country’s self-divisions and betrayals. Jones doesn’t present Baggit sentimentally or symbolically; if his ...”

“... without the Shakespeare. The Preface is all suspicious brevity on the matter: ‘We regret that Martin Gilbert was unable to come to the conference.’ Perhaps Gilbert was simply busy, or recuperating from a white-water rafting or a hang-gliding contretemps. But of course the words can also be interpreted to mean that Gilbert was invited, but not offered ...”

“... New York, 3 October. We get the following points of view mingled with many others: that of Cotter Martin, a 14-year old black boy, who has jumped the turnstiles to get in for free; that of Russ Hodges, a radio commentator; those of J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason who have arrived together. Gleason is playing hookey from a rehearsal for The ...”

“... key debates can be carried on almost unseen in long afternotes. Even such an authoritative work as Philip Williams’s Gaitskell, with its unrivalled picture of postwar Labour politics, wholly omits Gaitskell’s colourful sex life. ‘I decided at the outset I wasn’t going into all that,’ he told me. American biography, as Robert Caro’s vast Life of LBJ ...”

“... as ‘a deliberate effort to use air power as an instrument of massacre and terrorism’. For Philip Noel-Baker, MP and peace activist, the precedent was ‘extremely dangerous to us and to the world . . . such methods will come to be regarded as accepted practice, which all too probably would be the starting point for the next war.’ Anxious citizens ...”

“... politicians mingled freely at the Mitre and Mermaid clubs and at the taverns associated with them. Martin Butler has demonstrated the prominence of playgoing in the shaping and sustaining of the political outlook of the Caroline gentry. Beneath that social level, as one would never guess from the standard social histories of the period, huge audiences watched ...”

“... had already attempted to colonise the fringes of Scottish Gaeldom with civilising Lowlanders, as Martin MacGregor’s essay in the collection edited by Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheál O Siochrú makes clear. From Giraldus Cambrensis to the chronicler John of Fordun, medieval commentators from Britain had demonised the Gaels for their barbarous ways. Such ...”

“... Britain’; there had been ‘nothing like it since Inigo Jones’. The great American modernist Philip Johnson praised its ‘distinction’ in the Architectural Review. Local people disliked it, possibly because, as the Smithsons thought, they were unsophisticated but without doubt because the combination of glass façades and inadequate underfloor heating ...”

“... ring parable the centrepiece of his play Nathan the Wise, an appeal for interreligious peace. Martin Luther, a less tolerant soul, preferred another tale about a Jew for its vigorous anti-Catholic message. In this story (Day One, Story Two), the Parisian merchant Giannotto tries to convert his Jewish friend Abraham out of concern for his soul, but Abraham ...”

“... design: to stop Stalker. On the basis of his interim report Stalker has been appointed by Sir Philip Myers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Police, to conduct a full inquiry into the part played by the RUC in the 1982 killings. Impatient to resume his task, he is frustrated by administrative obstacles which are put in his way: but finally decides to ...”

“... by virtue of merely being very good. Donald Davie’s Christian Verse is very good. It joins Philip Larkin’s Twentieth-Century Verse to make the most brilliantly interesting Oxford Books of recent years: two books to be read as books are read, and not merely consulted as the OED is consulted. The fact that both Davie and Larkin are good poets, used to ...”

“... Delaware seems really to be a neat updating of the past, an amiable new cousin for Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe. Binyon is impressed by Chandler, although he thinks Marlowe is a ‘romanticised and to a certain extent sentimentalised’ version of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade; a little impatient with Macdonald, too cerebral and meaningful for his taste ...”