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“... At​ the carol concert in St Martin-in-the-Fields, two weeks before Christmas, shoppers and squawking babies filled the church’s elegant interior. It’s a sort of Christmas cake of a building, with dark panelling and white stucco icing, but the only hints of the season were the looping boughs of fir hung from the galleries ...”

“... on working in obscurity and breaking out in unfamiliar fashion on the page. Miller writes on Martin Amis as ‘the latest of Anglo-America’s dualistic artists’ for whom ‘the world wavers,’ as we read in Money, and ‘people are doubling.’ Maybe so, but taken in this spirit the process becomes banal, in the novel or out of it. Over-knowingness ...”

“... and British intelligence services in the Middle East and North Africa that are the subject of Martin Thomas’s immensely informed, meticulous and close-grained study not only had an interest in finding activities – unrest, subversion, proto-nationalism – which they then might surveil and suppress: they sought out precisely those activities that best ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... disqualified as a guide to modern times by his ‘proclamation of man’s total impotence on the eve of man’s greatest scientific discoveries and enduring cultural achievement’. He pined for martyrdom, and held, somewhat masochistically, that the Church was never spiritually secure except when it was being persecuted. Oberman underlines the enigma all ...”

“... mode is ‘Strap Down in Snowville’. The drunk/poet is locked in a toilet cubicle on Christmas Eve, ‘lollbonce on black plastic rim’, reviewing a maudlin parade of multiple selves, ‘Sweeney Swan Ludlunatic, revelling Leveller without/sober reveilles’ – a true ‘Sweeno’s Beano’. He debates whether he is for cure or oblivion and in the last ...”

“... Hemingway shot himself. His death is the only regret of my magnificent career.’ The cartoonist Martin Rowson got the last laugh in the Independent on Sunday, with a riff on the ‘body of literature’: ‘And yet where are Publishers in this Corporeal Plan?/You’ll see them as a TAPEWORM if you do a CT scan.’ Alongside these lines was a caricature of ...”

“... has forgotten a sense of shame,’ says Moira at Newbury. ‘Here is valour,’ says Martin. ‘Here is honour. Your word is your honour.’ ‘Politics has been here for ten minutes.’ A politician, to them, is little more than the spiv on the street corner, minding his creases. Protesters love the past, and protect it by living in it. At first ...”

“... can be anywhere nowadays. It’s computers. Actually the person who could help you at Aylesbury is Martin but I happen to know he’s out on a job most of today.’ ‘I wonder whether I ought to go down to Aylesbury,’ Mr Ransome said, ‘just to see if there’s anything there.’ Christine was unenthusiastic. ‘I can’t actually stop you,’ she ...”

“... and France in the medieval and early modern periods. Among Febvre’s books were a biography of Martin Luther and a book about the Rhine. The first issue of Annales included studies of the price of papyrus in Ancient Greece, German industry in the First World War, the population problem in the Soviet Union, and the theories of Max Weber. Articles and ...”

“... Burgess (who appears under his own name) and the clumsily veiled author of The Hormones of the New Eve, ‘Angela Lobster’. Will, an American journalist on intimate terms with the French intelligentsia, is supposedly writing his novel during a year’s sabbatical from his paper. Since he spends much of his time on aeroplanes, flying almost daily to ...”

“... is, he does not tell us; I imagine that his cover picture, of the risen Christ leading Adam and Eve out of the fires of Hell, has something to do with it. Dante’s tripartite opus is evoked here, so there is presumably a similar Christian drift to the thought that brought him to write the book: that physical improvements in life, in European life ...”

“... Barthes emerges as one of many heroes in this book, along with Wittgenstein, Catherine Opie and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Harry is Harry Dodge, the artist, filmmaker and genderqueer pioneer, who chooses to live, biologically and socially, between genders while mostly answering to, and passing when he wants to, as ‘he’. Language as most people know and use ...”

“... Ortona,​ Christmas Eve, 1943. A thriving Adriatic port only days previously, it now lay in ruins. The population of ten thousand was gone. In their place were two battalions of elite Fallschirmjäger – German paratroopers – defending what was left of the town, and the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, who were under orders to take it ...”

“... with the events of the late 1960s: racism, riots, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Russian troop movements, the liberalisation of communism in Czechoslovakia. Where she comes from informs what she sees. After Bobby Kennedy’s murder, she makes a list of ‘Attempted and successful assassinations since the ...”