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“... Though she was lucky to get such a big advance for her apprentice manuscript – half a dozen of Martin Amis – she set about learning the tricks of the trade from those who knew better, and is still learning. This, her second book, shorter and sharper than her first, is generally a better read. Compared with The Downing Street Years, it has the more ...”

“... his Mary, a fleshly image reproduced as illusion on screen, is also the vision of a seductress, Eve all over again, whose body and speech could persuade a man to eat ... anything. As Bloch says, the story misogyny tells is repeated again and again; it’s a room with a hundred entrances and exits – different societies, different moments, different voices ...”

“... Il Cortegiano (1528) – and lists 34 titles including Edward Hoby’s Afternoon Belchings; Martin Luther’s On Shortening the Lord’s Prayer; and The Art of copying out within the compass of a Penny all the truthful statements made to that end by John Foxe. ‘With these books at your elbow,’ Donne suggests, ‘you may in almost every branch of ...”

“... printing press is displayed alongside a first edition of the Bible translated into German by Martin Luther. All of this testifies to a flourishing urban cultural life in the late medieval and early modern period. The Holy Roman Empire and its elaborate judicial, administrative and electoral institutions held things together only in a limited sense, as a ...”

“... sent Simon to Holland Park comprehensive, designed for the London County Council by Leslie Martin. ‘It was chaos,’ he remembers. He was bullied and his parents’ way of life embarrassed him, though later, he says, he came to see that his childhood had been ‘amazing’ – an ambiguous verdict. Other households were more experimental. Nancy Spain ...”

“... walls were made of concrete shingles rather than plaster. Into this folly, not completed until the eve of the First World War, his parents poured all their savings and more. Le Corbusier was effectively trapped in the Jura; he didn’t get to Paris again until 1917. In wartime he saw himself more as an engineer than an architect, preoccupied with technical and ...”

“... you to pick your way through the raucous crowd gathered there in the summer of 1975. Here is Martin, her faithful lover, ‘teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack’. Here is Javo, ‘just back from getting off dope in Hobart’, Lou, Selena, Georgie, Clive, Eve, Gracie – and a little boy ...”

“... made out. Desire for ever more amazing spectacles was universal, exemplified by the career of Martin Beckman, a Swedish mercenary tasked with arranging fireworks for Charles II’s coronation in 1661; he held the post of royal fire master for the next forty years. Unfazed by confessional differences, Beckman put on great shows that lightened the royal ...”

“... decision-making, just as it would a few months later when smartphone videos of the New Year’s Eve riot at Cologne Central Station triggered another 180 degree turn in her policies. In July a PR event, part of a government campaign to encourage cabinet members to meet ordinary citizens and listen to their ideas, went wrong. One of the young people invited ...”

“... in the new and more radical Reformation promoted in mainland Europe by rogue clerics such as Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli. Wolsey’s dissolutions went ahead: 29 mostly small monastic houses, nothing on the scale of Henry VIII’s later programme, but still a model for what came next. In short: monasteries into colleges. This is where Clark’s ...”

“... in part to the otherwise ‘laughable’ privileges they had enjoyed under the French. (On the eve of independence, there were more than 100,000 Jews in Tunisia; today, hardly a thousand remain.) While he didn’t criticise the colonised for using violence, and mocked European liberals who did so, he didn’t see violence as shock therapy: ‘You don’t ...”

“... it is untrue to say that ‘Orwell was to put this thought more pithily in Animal Farm.’ Eve is talking about the possible advantages of withholding her forbidden knowledge from Adam, not about totalitarian perversions of democracy. It is even more reprehensible for a professor of politics to misquote Hobbes’s most famous remark, about the horrors ...”

“... in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit. The 15th century had seen a great flowering of the visual ...”

“... Miller offers a ‘likeness’. The word is well chosen. In Hogg’s Confessions, the devilish Gil-Martin assumes the likeness of other men and penetrates their thoughts just by pondering their faces. This is close to Hogg’s practice as a writer. Impersonation, mimicry, ventriloquism: these are central to his work. Hogg forged old ballads. He parodied ...”

“... Maugham and Julian Symons, just as Dumas, and Boublil and Schönberg, have pounced on the story of Martin Guerre, and Verlaine, Georg Trakl and Peter Handke, not to mention a dozen playwrights and film-makers, have taken up the tale of Kaspar Hauser. These days the celebrity machine has taken over the translation business: Bottom’s dream is acted out on Big ...”