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“... Since Success, Martin Amis has been involved in a spectacular case of alleged plagiarism. As the apparently aggrieved author, Amis showed himself notably unresentful and unlitigious. Indeed, he took the offence as an occasion to ruminate good-naturedly on the oddities of literary ‘borrowing’. It’s relevant to bring this up since Other People depends very largely on a trick which is usually thought to be someone else’s trademark ...”

“... in the Soviet Union in 1963-64. Shortly before he was due to leave for Moscow, Reddaway’s friend Martin Dewhirst took him to meet someone from NTS, a nice man, like most of the people Reddaway meets, who asked him to act on NTS’s behalf in the Soviet Union. Reddaway wouldn’t agree to that, though he promised to ‘write via a secure channel to ...”

“... emphatic support for many of the arguments about hostility to industry recently expounded by Martin Wiener in his English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. Women are another group who seem peripheral to this male and mandarin world. In explaining why there were so few of them in the earliest volumes of the DNB, Lee noted that ...”

“... overconfident wealthy dilettante, but Clark’s senior curatorial opponent inside the gallery, Martin Davies, and his chief enemy outside it, Charles Bell (who regarded Clark as a protégé who had betrayed him), were deeply distrustful of visual analysis, and their ideal of art historical scholarship consigned ...”

“... it closer to home at least once. On 1 August 1939 Kathleen and her friend Julia Vickers met Frank Martin, who took them driving around Charleston, West Virginia in his grey Packard convertible. At Valley Bell Dairy he bought them cheese, and at Dan’s Beer Parlor he got them pints. Kathleen said they ought to rent a room ...”

“... cast of characters at social events on Morningside Heights: Diana and Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald – all of them brilliant, feisty, friendly and endlessly voluble. Some of their hangers-on were third-rate intellectual goons like Arnold Beichmann (former Communist, rabid anti-Communist, now an aged relic of the Hoover ...”

“... associations, invisible but well attested. Down an alleyway running south off Carter Lane lies New Bell Yard. Now dominated by the glass-fronted atrium of the Grange St Paul’s Hotel, this was formerly the site of the Bell Inn. In the 1590s its landlady was a Mistress Greffine or Griffin, and among its frequent guests was a ...”

“... the women with their arms folded, shaking their heads. I crossed the street and rang the bell. And again. And for what? I tried the back door, the kitchen porch. Then Michiko called me. Together we stared through the living-room window. Bujak sat at the table, hunched forward as if he needed all the power of his back and shoulders just to hold ...”

“... He married his cousin Mary ‘Minnie’ Sedgwick, and set to work fathering six children: Martin, Arthur, Nelly, Maggie, Fred and Hugh. Appointed the first headmaster of the newly established Wellington College, he made a reputation as a personality in the Arnoldian mould (his sermons were collected and published under the title Boy Life, Its ...”

“... many comparably harrowing stories to be evoked: This was the period of the Irish famine and Mrs Bell Martin ... devoted herself to the relief of her father’s tenants. In so doing, she ruined her family and was gratefully termed ‘The Princess of Connemara’ by her people. Thereafter penniless and landless, she emigrated to Belgium where she ...”

“... of old streets to make way for its City and Southwark approaches. A view from the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields (1827) showing the shored-up backs of houses on the south side of Duke’s Court strikingly anticipates the look of a semi-blitzed London terrace in 1945. But it is, in Peter Jackson’s words, ‘the ordinary people of London going about ...”

“... and war, and the selection provides a sober roll-call: Ida B. Wells, Aneurin Bevan, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Václav Havel, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Its portrayal of the first half of the century has solidity; you are in safe, if stubby hands. There are also some poignant contributions: the broken dreams of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi Stephen ...”

“... Wholeness and the Implicate Order and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child. In Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis acknowledges, among a number of others, Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, Lawrence Shainberg’s Brain Surgeon and ‘the works of Primo Levi, in particular If this is a man, The Truce, The Drowned and the Saved and Moments of Reprieve’. It is ...”

“... link would mean changing everything. Someone who experimented with creating a whole new chain was Martin Wolfe, a plant pathologist who died last year. At his farm near Fressingfield in Suffolk, Wolfe developed cereal populations based on the principle of diversity rather than uniformity. He became convinced that the solution to disease resistance in cereals ...”

“... in issue after issue’ of magazines aimed ‘exclusively at a female readership’. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood imagines sitting in the crook of a tree with a possible future hanging just out of reach on each branch: she can only choose one, and choosing it means losing all the others, so she watches, trapped, as one by one they ripen, fall and ...”