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“... the everyday now, as indeed it must have done then.From his grandfather, the sightless Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma (common ancestor with the current Vice-President, whom Vidal refuses to meet because of his connection to Martin Peretz’s plaything, the New Republic), the boy became steeped in American political lore ...”

“... is with us still. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s appreciation. He received instead one of the rings of which Byron kept a plentiful supply to distribute to admirers. Noel was used to disappointment. An illegitimate cousin of ...”

“... years before the Battle of Waterloo. As a teenager, through the influence of his elder brother, Thomas, himself a gifted artist and architect, Paul Sandby was taken on as a military draftsman for the Board of Ordnance, producing reliable maps for use in the subjugation of the Highlands. By the time of his death, his astonishing industry had earned him many ...”

“... to tradition. He used and adapted the tone of the great masters of English eloquence: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. He brought, he wrote, ‘a special attitude’ to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral of Chartres, and to the Empire State Building . . . These were not really my creations; they ...”

“... and German intellectual life: Karl Polanyi, Oscar Jasci, Emil Lask and Karl Mannheim; Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Georg Simmel, Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Jaspers, Max Weber, Paul Ernst and Thomas Mann. By interweaving, in chronological sequence, letters written by Lukacs with letters he received, this collection draws the strands ...”

“... Jean Calvin asked, lambasting the pair for filling the Gospel with ‘wicked additions’. Martin Luther thought that the papists hoped to conceal knowledge about Muhammad because they knew how similar his Alcoran was to their own adulterated brand of Christianity. He pushed for a printed edition of the Quran in Latin, and wrote the preface when it ...”

“... did we.There were nine Ferraris on the track, along with two Lamborghinis, a Porsche, an Aston Martin, a Maserati, a McLaren, an Alfa Romeo, a pair of Audis and a Nissan (if you think that sounds like the odd one out, think again: the Nissan GT-R has a top speed of nearly 200 mph and can go from 0 to 60 in 2.7 seconds). The F430 (top speed 197 mph, and 0 ...”

“... norm during life. Failing that, writers might agitate for pre-publication advances closer to the Martin Amis mark, though I doubt that they’d get them. On the face of it, a greater stress on ‘moral rights’ is not necessarily a bad thing. What, in practical terms, it means is that an author can still object to mistreatment of what remains ‘his’ work ...”

“... Doubles, he explored themes of duality, of divided identity, in works ranging from James Hogg to Martin Amis. In Rebecca’s Vest he encounters these same tensions as shapers of his own experience, his own divided self. As he discovers when he comes to read through his adolescent diaries, Miller is both revealer and concealer. His candour is both eager and ...”

“... was reported by the only survivor of the massacre in Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar. It is repeated in Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust and is used in D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, both of which Darville admits having read. Five days later, subterranean whispers of plagiarism had turned into a shriek. Not only did The Hand ...”

“... forcings are unusually rigid. My point against Stone is not the one commonly understood by Martin Amis’s comment that his father wished he had more sentences of the order of ‘He finished his drink and left the room.’ Stone’s realism would not be transformed if he just wrote more fancily, though it might be a little more interesting. The ...”

“... to a close: every few months came a further contribution – not a few of them from the pen of Martin Amis – to a subject which is widely supposed to be exhausted. To suppose it exhausted is not to be unable to suppose that its new works may be pathfinders: the subject presents both faces. At all events, I swallowed my anxieties and tackled The ...”

“... trial, about which he published a book, or deal at length with his favourite editor, Kingsley Martin, whose biography he wrote. There is no law against writing one’s life twice over, if there is good ore still to be delved, but it can mean fobbing off the reader with ‘as I have described elsewhere ...’ It is hard to believe, from these ruminative ...”

“... on how we write and think about the ancient world. The best-known version of this approach is Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, his sometimes brilliant, more often wilfully obtuse, exploration of the various forms of racism embedded within classics as a discipline. In Compromising Traditions (a collection of essays deriving from major – now notorious ...”

“... to Ronald Reagan. Those he dislikes, on the other hand, are little more than caricatures: Thomas Paine, for example, was ‘a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler’. No one seeking a fair-minded account of the American past will find it here. On the other hand, anyone who has wondered whether the history of the United States can ...”