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“... six shillings each. She never asked to meet him. She wanted only to listen and to be listened to. Charles Wheeler was still overseas, and Shaw saw himself, or pretended to, as a senile version of the ‘Sunday husband’ he had been, in the 1890s. to May Morris. In 1945, however, Charles came home, and although the problem ...”

“... Many people in Washington were surprised when the Obama administration tapped Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the production of National Intelligence Estimates: Freeman had a distinguished 30-year career as a diplomat and Defense Department official, but he has publicly criticised Israeli policy and America’s special relationship with Israel, saying, for example, in a speech in 2005, that ‘as long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected ...”

“... caller was restating a position which was already unfashionable in the late 18th century. Martin Rudwick traces the development of ideas about the way rock strata were formed – and over what period of time – through the writings and correspondence of learned men from the late 18th century to the early years of the 19th. His approach is ...”

“... been no French Revolution, no America. This is what happened not in a dream but metaphorically to Martin Luther, a hitherto obscure monk and professor of theology in an undistinguished university recently founded in Wittenberg, a small town built on a sandbank in middle Germany. The first historian of what came to be known as the Reformation, Johann ...”

“... reports of barely credible drunken violence and insult. Sometimes it seems that his novel Pincher Martin is a nightmare autobiography or ‘confession’, and in fact that is what Golding himself called it. One can also detect an association between sexual violence and creative inspiration. In the posthumous novel The Double Tongue – very likely the least ...”

“... glinting eyes, in Reynolds’s 1778 portrait, stare fixedly past us from the dust-jacket of Peter Martin’s biography. Indeed the book’s steady prose, for all its professions of admiration, does little to suggest that Martin (the first writer to undertake a life of Malone since 1860) has managed to muster much of the ...”

“... not be analysed in The Spanish Armada, published in 1988 by the underwater archaeologist Colin Martin and the historian Geoffrey Parker. Of the hundred or so books marking the quatercentenary of the fleet’s defeat, theirs stood out for its fusion of archaeology and documentary evidence: a triumph of rubber and tweed underpinned by collegiate spirit ...”

“... particular, or it is a depiction of Chastity. All in all, it may be best to follow the example of Martin Kemp, whose 1981 study of the artist laconically captioned the painting Portrait of a Lady on a Balcony – though even this will not satisfy those denizens of the Mona Lisa websites and news groups who believe that she is really a man, and perhaps even ...”

“... from Fort Worth showing the Temptation of St Anthony, a composition based on an engraving by Martin Schongauer. If an early biographer had not reported that Michelangelo made such a picture as a student, it is doubtful whether anyone would have attributed this panel to him. The Manhattan Boy. A better idea of Michelangelo’s artistic priorities is ...”

“... underpopulated. The popes only returned there on a permanent basis some time after 1450, although Martin V had spent some years there in the 1420s. The city was without any substantial or sustained local tradition of painting and so the main artists were mainly from the papal states of Central Italy and from Tuscany, particularly from Florence, which also ...”

“... year. Stretching out. In one of his poems – later echoed by Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy – Charles Bukowski complains about the terror behind the thought of tying one’s shoes every morning, of brushing one’s teeth. The AA meeting room in this defeated old church stank of that terror. I took my 24 coin, the red one, plastic, out of my pocket, and ...”

“... Primary Colors, whoever the author, is a first novel. If so, it’s the best fictional debut since Martin Amis. There isn’t a slack line or a flat character in the book; even walk-ons like the Stanton family doctor, ‘thin almost to the point of consumption, and tilted somehow, like the Tower of Pisa, wearing a cape and a hat and small round glasses, like ...”

“... of political wisdom. I wonder what kind of pragmatic compromise the president would have urged Martin Luther King to make with the segregationists in the South? After putting aside the Sunday papers after lunch and peeking out of the window at the snow beginning to fall, I closed my eyes in my chair and concluded that clearly there hasn’t been enough ...”

“... in Paris: l’éducation continentale by Michael Sadler (Simon and Schuster, £10). On 14 April Charles wrote Sadler a letter, duly circulated a few weeks later by his publishers (I don’t think it’s a hoax). To make sense of it, it’s useful to know that Sadler’s book opens with a description of a large cheese: The first chapter certainly did not ...”

“... from ‘Thinkability’, the introduction to Einstein’s Monsters, and is, in a way, a typical Martin Amis paragraph: Every morning, six days a week, I leave the house and drive a mile to the flat where I work. For seven or eight hours I am alone. Each time I hear a sudden whining in the air or one of the more atrocious impacts of city life, or play host ...”