“... going to Glasgow to visit a friend; he is taking the whole week off to write a review of the new Martin Amis novel. What with Hanif Kureishi and Martin Amis it’s surprising I have any confidence left. On Thursday morning I went to see Jill at the Polish Club. This is where I’ll have the launch party. I insisted on ...”

“... and quiet down – and the queasy attitude of those white ‘moderates’ in the 1960s whom Martin Luther King lamented in his famous letter from jail in Birmingham, Alabama were ‘more devoted to “order” than to justice’.‘The thing is,’ Smith told Curve magazine earlier this year,everyone has an identity ...”

“... and experimental forms, but can create neither vivid caricatures nor daring experiments. Martin Amis seems to want to borrow that very faculty – soul – about which he is most naturally, and most amusingly, ironic. And Iris Murdoch has written repeatedly that the definition of the great novel is the free and realised life it gives to its ...”

“... There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ said King Duncan in the fourth scene of Macbeth. But there was, and Shakespeare knew this. Almost at the moment he was writing the play, a new law required that anybody who professed ‘a knowledge of phisnognomie’ – one version of the name by which the practice of reading character in facial features was known to the learned – was to be ‘openly whipped untill his body be bloudye ...”

“... which is bringing back the sound of different, personal voices and particular tales. Margaret King’s richly researched Women of the Renaissance explores the lives and works of foundlings and drudges, poets and princesses in a painstaking mesh of social, financial and legal detail. But it has to be said that the discourse of misogyny, divorcing women ...”

“... was, also by coincidence, a study of a single royal event. This was Mass-Observation’s study of King George VI’s coronation in 1937 – May 12. Two hundred ‘observers’ were posted about the country and instructed to note what they observed: with the exception of those who kept a record of what they themselves felt, they were not to intrude or act as ...”

“... conflicts within Christianity, for example, opponents consistently accuse each other of Judaising. Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish invectives were closely tied to his critique of the Catholic Church: practices like the trade in indulgences – as if God’s mercy could be bought – showed the Jewish corruption of a church that valued works more than faith. The ...”

“... Il Cortegiano (1528) – and lists 34 titles including Edward Hoby’s Afternoon Belchings; Martin Luther’s On Shortening the Lord’s Prayer; and The Art of copying out within the compass of a Penny all the truthful statements made to that end by John Foxe. ‘With these books at your elbow,’ Donne suggests, ‘you may in almost every branch of ...”

“... good with pilaff, and can darn cotton socks like crazy.’ Indiscreet praise is still slander. Martin Samson says, endeavouring to ‘introduce’ The Ambassadors, that ‘the main purpose of an introduction, as usually written, seems to be the statement of a critical opinion of the literary work concerned. Possibly the best place for such an opinion would ...”

“... He has come into all the material collected by John Lehmann’s commissioned biographer, Martin Taylor, who died before he could write a word of it. He has seen photocopies of the extensive diaries, and he has interviewed the survivors and their descendants. Lehmann himself wrote three volumes of dignified autobiography about his work, his ...”

“... any way memorable, even a chapter that’s memorable. I’ve always liked ‘Henderson the Rain King’ for one. Oh no. Dull, dull ... I think he’s a dull man and a dull writer. Hello, Saul, how are you? Do you feel that way about Philip Roth? Oh, only more so. Philip Roth’s quite funny in a living-room but ... forget it. Bernard ...”

“... women’ were wearing ‘the dress of ladies’ and ‘poor clerks … clothes like those of the king’. This spending caused rapid inflation. Prices were out of control: two pennies for a gallon of beer. The London authorities tried to fix a ‘reasonable price’ for meat – seven pence for a capon baked in pastry, sixpence for the best kind of ...”

“... backwater into ‘the first modern society’. That Parliament should first fight against the king in 1642 and then, seven years later, not simply bring that king to trial but abolish the institution of monarchy was remarkable. That the same royal dynasty should be restored in 1660 only to be forcibly removed in 1688 ...”

“... over the next ten years, with $110 billion right away, of benefit particularly to Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. The State Department celebrated the deal as supporting ‘the long-term security of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region in the face of malign Iranian influence and Iranian-related threats’. But the last few months have seen a series of changes ...”

“... dark. The rubies move: they are better, they are beetles.When he entered the university it took Martin a long time to decide on a field of study. There were so many, and all were fascinating. He procrastinated on their outskirts, finding everywhere the same magical spring of vital elixir. He was excited by the viaduct suspended over an alpine precipice, by ...”