“... Reviewing a new edition of Ulysses in 1986, Martin Amis had a few reservations about the book’s popularity with scholarly intermediaries. James Joyce, he concluded, ‘could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet ...”

“... to divest yourself for the sake of others, you will be trapped like William Golding’s Pincher Martin in a hell which is the inability to die. By the end of Golding’s novel, Martin has dwindled to a pair of huge, lobster-like claws tenaciously protecting his dark centre of selfhood from the ‘black lightning’ of ...”

“... Oscar Wilde called experience the name one gives to one’s mistakes, while for Samuel Johnson it was what hope triumphed over for those who married a second time. Emerson thought all experience was valuable, an opinion not shared by the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay. Plato and Spinoza saw it as a realm of illusion, to be contrasted with the pure light of reason ...”

“... demonstrate. Even if the owners’ enthusiasm was misplaced, and the loyalty of patrons (like the Johnson Wax company who still proudly maintain their no-longer functioning research lower) mere sentimentality, the clarity of design which makes the best houses or the Guggenheim Museum so memorable would speak. Few other architects, working through into the ...”

“... for everything from food to biofuels. In 1974 a second school was opened in Brussels (Boris Johnson, whose father was working in the Environment Sub-Directorate, attended for two years). After the UK joined the EEC a school was opened in 1978 in Culham in Oxfordshire, where research was taking place into nuclear fusion. In each new school the mission ...”

“... magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States Government, with particular reference to the American war ...”

“... only if long enough to mourn his own life. Of course, he will do more than that, and it is part of Martin Dodsworth’s task in Hamlet Closely Observed to examine the code of conduct, and the place of honour, in the life of the Prince and others, to bring out what might be called the under-examined social history of the play. But Hamlet, one way or ...”

“... of making fun of the kind of thriller that takes pains to specify the particular model of Aston Martin the hero drives. (It may also be a nod to Martin Amis’s Money, in which the narrator drives a Fiasco.) Elsewhere, though, Herron allows the real world to intrude in a way that doesn’t always quite work. There’s a ...”

“... been to the fore, in a campaign characterised by perhaps the broadest ideological divergence since Johnson v. Goldwater in 1964. Mutual vilification has been the order of the day, Carter’s brand of positive political philosophy being to brand his opponent ‘racist’ and ‘warmonger’, and to avoid at all costs discussion of his own record in office. It ...”

“... Rosie Lee Tompkins​ , born Effie Mae Martin in Gould, Arkansas in 1936, grew up picking cotton alongside her fourteen siblings and half-siblings. As was common for a child of rural sharecroppers, her formal schooling was limited, but Tompkins learned to sew by making bedcoverings with her mother, scrapping together any available pieces of cloth ...”

“... at Dozier School for Boys: it tells the story of Elwood Curtis, a talented 16-year-old acolyte of Martin Luther King Jr, who has hope and promise snatched away by the torturous racial violence to which he’s subjected at a reform school in Florida in the early 1960s.Assured of another bestseller, Whitehead turned back to Harlem Shuffle. Unlike Elwood ...”

“... neither of Kennedy’s immediate successors served what should have been their normal terms – Johnson repudiating a life of successful power-brokering and exiling himself to Texas to avoid what he was certain would be defeat in the race for a second term, and Nixon eluding impeachment by a hair. The two decent men who followed, Ford and Carter, seemed ...”

“... in my intellectual banquet.’ In late adolescence Steinbeck evidently came under the spell of Martin Eden. Imitating Jack London, he dropped out of college (Stanford in Steinbeck’s case, Berkeley in London’s), went on the road as a hobo and made a rather fitful stab at running away to sea. Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold (1929, based on the ...”

“... will have carried a special charge for Barlow. ‘On yer bike!’ Hovis preceded Boris (Mayor Johnson) as sponsor of the cult of cycling, but the whole business, so attractive to ad men and lavishly rewarded imagineers, never moved far from Scott’s syrupy terrain. (Scott was a cycle obsessive. His first short film, made in 1965 in his student days at ...”

“... he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A.K. Laidlaw’. We tend to think of the subject of this biography as the greatest voice of modern Scottish literature; more accurately, he is the greatest ...”