“... and black, as the camera begins a slow pan to the right before the scene fades into a close-up of Martin Sheen’s upside-down face. In Coppola’s film, it takes precisely a minute for heaven to be turned into hell; in Tree of Smoke the process is a little slower. The novel begins on 23 November 1963: ‘Last night at 3 a.m. President Kennedy had been ...”

“... career as designer and manufacturer. There are more than seventy previously unpublished letters to Thomas Wardle, manager of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co, which prove exhaustively how careful he was about the dyeing and printing of their fabrics and to what lengths he went to get the colours right. He liked nothing better than putting on smock and ...”

“... at least attractive (‘lawns dark and wet as spinach’). Or the thoughts of another young man, Martin, one of Friedrich’s friends, become both fiendish and camp, though they sound slightly odd when we remember we’re supposedly reading a translation from the German. Take the hilarious moment when Martin very ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and Martin discuss Wagner’s influence on others: but all three are too little concerned with the peculiar nature and conditions of Wagner’s own musical-dramatic achievement. Why do so many musical terms, like ‘composed’, ‘resolve’ or ‘tonic’, also ...”

“... looking back from 1555. A student at Wittenberg, he becomes a follower of the radical theologian Thomas Müntzer after witnessing a dispute between Müntzer and Martin Luther; Luther Blissett is very much not on his namesake’s side. The narrator’s story begins a few years later, in medias res, at Frankenhausen on 15 ...”

“... for Larkin and a bit of Bix Beiderbecke. Ten years later, at Stephen Spender’s wingding in St Martin-in-the-Fields, there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At ...”

“... as well as scores of high-profile travesties of justice – notably the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer, George Zimmerman, which gave birth to the #BlackLivesMatter movement – alongside many more ambiguous affronts (such as the lack of nominees of colour at the 2015 Academy Awards, which gave birth to the #OscarsSoWhite ...”

“... who styled himself Sahib-kiran or ‘world conqueror’ – and within, in the form of the Martin Luther-inspired religious reform which threatened to tear the Holy Roman Empire apart.Charles would rise to all these challenges. That he might be the monarch who would not only keep Christendom together but project it into new corners of the globe was an ...”

“... to find a way to live. In the book, Kerouac had divided himself among several brothers named Martin. One (Pete) was fiercely determined to excel at football, a second (Joe) drove big trucks and longed to wander the West at terrifying speed on a motorcycle, and a third (Francis) was ‘a musing, discontented, lonely young reader of books … filled with a ...”

“... in motion just as the Keynesian consensus was falling apart. States were pressured to put on what Thomas Friedman has referred to as the ‘golden straitjacket’ of market friendly policies (one size fits all) to maintain national competitiveness in a liberalising world economy. Apologists for Keynes and White’s creation argue that a new Bretton ...”

“... hero; Agustín de Iturbide, the Mexican; Emperor Pedro I of Brazil; and, finally, Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, the astonishing Scottish maverick who played a key part in the liberation of Peru and the consolidation of Brazilian independence. It was not fashionable in the later 20th century to see history in terms of its great men. Yet however ...”

“... Towards the end of 1533, Sir Thomas More turned to write the last of his harsh rejoinders to a pamphlet attack, printed abroad, on the Catholic doctrine of the eucharist. He did not know who the author was, though he guessed it to be his fierce old adversary William Tyndale, or perhaps George Joye, Tyndale’s former friend and collaborator, now his mortal enemy ...”

“... can be left till later, if only a little later. Clichés are infallible symptoms of used thinking. Martin Amis has always wanted to be a good writer and he has got what he wanted. He early acquired a habit of vigilance, of stopping clichés at the frontier, and that habit couldn’t easily be broken. He is one of the few critics who trouble, even in a shortish ...”

“... break with Rome, complete by 1534, England stood alone. Henry VIII’s imperial claims, couched in Thomas Cromwell’s majestic legalese, were introspective, asserting the power of the monarch freed from the constraints of papal rule. The economy was beset by inflation, there were land shortages and there was growing poverty, along with anxiety about the ...”