“... salsa rhythms and what Leonard calls ‘glitzy crap’. This glitz was the leading feature of Brian De Palma’s remake of Scarface, with its play on luminous surfaces in which blood, neon and Miami sunsets finally merge into a single crimson garishness. The same glitz features in the current TV hit, Miami Vice. Mafiosi are usually portrayed as dressing ...”

“... electoral pundits could barely find enough superlatives for the role played by Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen in the party’s triumph. Ahern, they said, was a ‘political tsunami’, and Cowen, if anything, even more formidable. This time around, neither Ahern nor Cowen was standing, rightly fearing the vengeance of the electorate. Cowen’s awe-inspiring ...”

“... States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day in July’ – a covert imputation and ...”

“... Spark, A Far Cry from KensingtonOn​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost purposefully unprofessional.After ...”

“... at last possible to survey his oeuvre as a whole: two volumes of Complete Poems were published by Martin Brian and O’Keeffe in 1978, and Penguin, in keeping with their best traditions, have risked issuing them in paperback. And it is coming to seem that the fault lay as much with the narrow criteria of the critics as with the ambitions of ...”

“... These are the MPs who are beloved of the whips, the so-called lobby fodder, and according to Martin Bell in A Very British Revolution, they are also the MPs who tend to claim the most for expenses: ‘There was nothing they wouldn’t claim for or, when the division bell sounded, vote for.’ Many of the current 646 MPs will not be returning to ...”

“... for all that, it wears its density more or less lightly. It favours stories about gangland hitmen (Brian ‘The Milkman’ Wright, ‘during his drug-dealing days he always delivered’; John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, once ‘one of Britain’s richest men, owning a fleet of private planes, helicopters, boats and cars’), and every few pages there’s a soap ...”

“... enthusiasm for armed struggle among hardline Republicans. During the Dublin debate, the historian Brian Hanley made a point that seems unanswerable to me, as it must to the majority of those whose backing the ‘dissidents’ (a label they have always rejected) seek: if the British establishment wasn’t prepared to withdraw in 1972, when the Provos killed a ...”

“... of them not easy to lay hands on, and it is impossible to speak too highly of the enterprise of Martin Brian and O’Keeffe in issuing in 1978 the first real Complete Poems, which superseded the earlier collected editions as well as the thirty or so constituent volumes from Annals of the Five Senses (1923, reprinted 1930) onwards. Of this first ...”

“... think tank pamphlet. Two of those hired to fill senior editorial positions, Charles Leadbeater and Martin Jacques, were ex-Communists who had wound up their party and formed Demos, a research centre aligned to Tony Blair’s New Labour project. Geoff Mulgan, a former Trotskyist and director of Demos, became a contributor to the paper’s opinion pages, as did ...”

“... book published by the National Portrait Gallery to accompany the BBC series of the same name, Brian Harrison, the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, observes that we are hardly alone ‘in placing the great at the centre of our national myth’: If Lloyd George and Winston Churchill epitomise national resistance to Germany ...”

“... trouble with this image of Nabokov is that it is a travesty, both of the oeuvre and of the life. Brian Boyd’s two-volume biography established a convincing (or, indeed, irrefutable) case for Nabokov the man, and made his story seem almost dismayingly exemplary; I can’t offhand remember a single incident from which Nabokov comes out badly, once we ...”

“... position is similar to that of many recent liberals writing in the analytical tradition, such as Brian Barry, John Rawls and Charles Larmore. These writers argue that, by their nature, conceptions of the good – theocratic, secularist, vegan, carnivorous, lesbian, polygamous, socialist, libertarian or whatever – give us insufficient reason to conclude ...”

“... to police violence against black people, but the protests against the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray were mostly confined to the cities in which the deaths had occurred. Obama was seen as sympathetic to BLM’s concerns, even if he offered little more than memorable speeches. Floyd’s death not only follows the killings of ...”

“... 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 ...”