“... him in context, Lukacher shows that Gandy was not the only artist who was at home in hell – John Martin also illustrated Milton – and not the only person disturbed by the notion that style in architecture is more like fashion in frocks than the language of poetry or philosophy. It is hard to believe now that deep connections link all architectural ...”

“... No one writing about Amis’s life can help but be intimidated by the dazzling presence of Martin Amis’s Experience (2000). An unclassifiable memoir-testament-album-apologia, this deeply clever book is also a love song to his father, whose last years and death it selectively recounts, interweaving other episodes in the son’s life, including ...”

“... What would it have been like to fall in love with the young Martin Amis, ‘the most fascinating man’ Gully Wells had ever met? ‘Only the most awful clichés,’ she tells us, ‘could possibly do justice to the way I felt.’ He was ‘very funny and very clever’; ‘he made me laugh and told me things I didn’t know ...”

“... the pressure-dependent thicks and thins of a pen-drawn line. Drypoints of night scenes by Martin Lewis exploit the uniquely dense blacks that etching can achieve. (In a number of them a dark ground was produced by first running the plate through the press with a sheet of sandpaper.) These are striking, if conventional, images that stand in a line you ...”

“... at the portraits close to for such details – all the time keeping in mind things Rica Jones and Martin Postle explain in their catalogue essay, ‘Gainsborough in His Painting Room’.* For example, that he said he could not ‘without taking away the likeness’ touch a portrait ‘unless from the life’; the report from Ozias Humphry, who watched him at ...”

“... was engraved, around 1658; it includes Somerset House in the south, Holborn in the north, Saint Martin’s Lane in the west and Lincoln’s Inn in the east. Hollar’s engraving of Leake’s post-fire survey (topped by a view of the fire from Southwark) gives another taste of what it might have been like. Maps document the way pride began to be tinged with ...”

“... 27 extant versions of the complaining Venus, more than fifty of Adam and Eve and many portraits of Martin Luther. Luther was a close friend, but that did not stand in the way of Cranach doing portraits of Canon Albrecht of Brandenburg, an anti-Lutheran Catholic dignitary who liked to be shown as St Jerome in his study. Cranach’s winged-serpent monogram on a ...”

“... in Sussex Gardens in 1963, infuriated the Commissioners by likening them to the slum landlord, Peter Rachman. Rachman, Bartlett said, had made life difficult for a few hundred people, the Church Commissioners had done the same for a few thousand. Another whinger was the Rev. Adam Duff, vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Bishop’s Bridge ...”

“... exploit the fears of all sections of society who suffer from Conservative attempts to demolish it. Peter Shore displays the greatest awareness of such an approach when he writes what is a remarkably frank eulogy of both Labour and Conservative governments after 1945. Gerald Kaufman, who, incidentally, is going to restore Rutland and the Soke of ...”

“... on Remembrance Day? Would he kneel to the queen when he was admitted to the Privy Council (see Martin Loughlin’s piece on p. 29)? On the day after he was elected, he spoke at a mental health trust fun day in his constituency instead of going on the Andrew Marr Show. Later that day he was filmed as he hurried along the pavement outside Westminster in ...”

“... Question does engage the attention of novelists, they approach it with glancing allusiveness, like Martin Amis, or cover it with the cloak of magical realism, which, whatever its dubious imaginative benefits, weakens any intended social point. So it is no surprise that Stuart Hood and Michael Dibdin concern themselves with the present state of society and ...”

“... is sui generis in the same way. It also seems to stand outside its author. Although Professor Martin does the best that can be done with him, FitzGerald was not, from the literary point of view, a particularly interesting man. He lacks the artistic quiddity of even such minor Victorian figures as Coventry Patmore or Francis Thompson. He is cousin to ...”

“... which are the real subjects. Deadpan looks at present-day English suburbs in photographs by Martin Parr and a painting of a patio by David Rayson are also urban landscapes rather than garden pictures. In Rayson’s picture white plastic chairs on a neatly mown lawn lean around a table as if avoiding the gaze of the identical new brick houses which ...”

“... for the delay). Raleigh’s attempts at colonisation followed hard on other ambitious voyages. Martin Frobisher thought he had found gold in the course of his 1576 search for the Northwest Passage. In 1578 he retraced his steps and brought home 1350 tons of ore from which ‘neither gold, silver nor any other metal could be drawn’. It was thrown away or ...”

“... and judges from across the Commonwealth and a few assorted persons appointed for specific reasons (Peter Riddell, for example, a former Times journalist who acquired membership in 2010 when appointed to the committee examining whether British intelligence services were complicit in the torture of Guantánamo detainees). If we want an official list of the ...”