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“... dinner, Stein threw herself off the balcony of her apartment on the Upper East Side.The writer Eve Babitz was Californian in the way Mao Zedong was Chinese or Billy Connolly is Scottish – for a living. Serially a model, a photographer, a spirited memoirist, a groupie and one of those irrepressible joint-rollers-to-the-stars, Babitz was fun at a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not be triedAt the last day? Will it then boot theeTo say a Philip, or a Gregory,A Harry, or a Martin taught thee this?(‘Philip’ is Philip II of Spain, ‘Gregory’ the pope, ‘Harry’ the Tudor king whose marital woes precipitated England’s break from Rome, and ‘Martin’ is ...”

“... forms, traditions and innovations from some date after its delivery in Palestine to the time of Martin Luther and the other 16th-century reformers, who broke the mould and put things right. I am not sure if Daniell holds that the average soul of the 15th century was happy in his bondage, or was one of John Foxe’s secret multitude of true believers, like ...”

“... enjoyment of what is apparently the most enviable of modern lives, she is unexpectedly deserted by Martin, her Classics-don-at-London-University husband. A ‘black sea of despair’ engulfs Jennifer. She lies awake until three o’clock in the morning in the empty marital home, ‘afraid; afraid of the future, afraid she was going mad, afraid of the wind ...”

“... until 1989. ‘Feliz Ano Novo’ describes an attack on a houseful of rich, white New Year’s Eve revellers by three armed slum-dwellers. One woman is raped and strangled. Shit is smeared on bedsheets. The narrator tries to get the ring off a dead woman’s finger but it won’t budge so he bites off the finger and throws the whole thing into a sack. A ...”

“... on the subsidised theatre in England. Although he doesn’t entirely agree with this model, Martin Gottfried is a New York drama critic and his new biography of Miller certainly outlines the orthodox view. The second son of a New York coat manufacturer bankrupted in the Depression, Miller burst onto Broadway with four plays which called the American ...”

“... giving supreme power to one charismatic leader. The radically primitivistic portrayal of Adam and Eve, their ‘majesty’ being sufficient even though ‘naked’, stands as a stark contrast; though contradictions are starting to enter with the description of Adam’s rule over Eve as ‘absolute’: his republicanism ...”

“... for us to understand.A couple of years later, Maeve began to write about another couple, Delia and Martin Bagot. Although they were discrete and full characters, their relationship bore a decided emotional resemblance to that of the Derdons. In Maeve’s last published story, she returned to the Derdons, as if she were trying to decide which couple were best ...”

“... norm during life. Failing that, writers might agitate for pre-publication advances closer to the Martin Amis mark, though I doubt that they’d get them. On the face of it, a greater stress on ‘moral rights’ is not necessarily a bad thing. What, in practical terms, it means is that an author can still object to mistreatment of what remains ‘his’ work ...”

“... prone to the overstatement of youth but this is the real thing. The voice here is like that of Martin Amis, whose mark is all over this novel, not just in the muscular, shouldering prose style – the style of John Self – but in Ripley’s rich tangle of adolescent preoccupations, his Charles Highway-like obsession with bodily products (‘matutinal ...”

“... have worried: every remaining FF bigwig, with the exceptions of the new party leader, Micheál Martin, and the outgoing finance minister, Brian Lenihan, was cleared off the stage on polling day. Tumbling from 77 seats in 2007 to 20 this time – and from 19 to one in the nation’s capital – Fianna Fáil was punished as thoroughly as anyone had dared ...”

“... learning, including Greek and Roman political philosophy, into the vernacular. By 1640, on the eve of civil war, the proportion of eligible men in further education was higher than at any time before the mid-20th century. The exchange of political ideas and opinions was further facilitated by the power and reach of the printed word, especially after the ...”

“... assassination and the Warren Commission Report.’ All this had been uncannily predicted on the eve of the assassination. The American historian Richard Hofstadter’s influential essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ was given as the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford on 21 November 1963. Hofstadter’s subject was the irrational underside of ...”

“... emphasises, the reader is the one who makes the difference. In her Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes: ‘it was only close to the end of the 19th century that a cross-class homosexual role and a consistent, ideologically full thematic discourse of male homosexuality became entirely visible, in developments that were publicly ...”