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“... Andy Martin is unlikely to convince many readers that Napoleon conquered Europe only as compensation for his inability to write a sentimental novel. His attention to the Emperor’s literary ambitions is, however, not unreasonable. Napoleon dreamed of literary as well as military glory, wrote copiously at various moments in his life, and had real talent for it (Sainte-Beuve called him ‘a great critic in his spare time’, while Thiers elevated him to ‘greatest writer of the century ...”

“... In The Enemy he takes aim at a villain who’s transparently modelled on Dick Cheney. Andy Martin, reviewing Nothing to Lose (2008), called Reacher ‘a liberal intellectual with … arms the size of Popeye’s’. It wasn’t much of an exaggeration at either end. Make Me, the latest Reacher novel, is a return to form after Personal ...”

“... The affair came to an end in the summer of 2004. A few weeks later, on Friday 13 August, Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World, showed up at Blunkett’s office in Sheffield to ask whether he was having an affair with a married woman. Blunkett recorded their conversation. The tape became the most important single piece of evidence in the ...”

“... The hero of the Toy Story trilogy is a toy cowboy. In Toy Story 3 when the toys belonging to Andy, now about to leave for college, find themselves at a daycare centre, and a kindly bear welcomes them into a community of toys freed from their owners, the cowboy alone stays loyal to Andy; and when the toy bear turns out to be a dictator worse than any owner, the cowboy, who was never persuaded by the rhetoric of toy solidarity, is proved right ...”

“... on the earth. I took everything to extremes in my old life.’ Alf is 33 years old. His friend Martin, a fellow Freegan, popped his head through from the back of the van and pushed his glasses up his nose. Martin is 36 and comes from Sydney. He said he was disillusioned as a teenager by the way everyone was obsessed with ...”

“... local businesses’ and then as ‘neighbourhood resistance to military occupation’. They quote Martin Luther King, who visited Watts at the end of the violence and encountered a young man who told him: ‘We won!’ King was baffled: ‘Thirty-some people are dead [and] all but two are Negroes. You’ve destroyed your own [businesses]. What do you ...”

“... Hergé’s original drawings, some of the sources that he drew on (and drew), a portrait of him by Andy Warhol, and various seafaring artefacts. The boy reporter’s first assignment was to Russia. The strips from Le Petit Vingtième were collected in a book published in 1930, Tintin au pays des Soviets. The Bolsheviks are fantastically evil: in one of the ...”

“... the nation, the best-known and most watched edition of the programme of his – or any – era was Martin Bashir’s interview with Princess Diana in 1995, a one-off scoop that owed little to his conception of current affairs, or to Panorama’s pre-Birt traditions. And when the programme did attempt a thorough analysis of how Britain functioned in the late ...”

“... in Brain Activity he moves on from persona into something more like impersonation. There is his Martin Creed, an animation of a hand turning a light switch on and off; his Gillian Wearing, a stuffed dog holding a placard saying ‘I’M DEAD’; and his Andy Goldsworthy, a photograph of some nicely coloured leaves, on one ...”

“... The 1990s don’t yet have a mood. They may forever be defined by the style they preceded, what Martin Amis, rather horrifically, called Horrorism. Others may see it as a last golden age of selling the silver and weeping over Diana and burning the dead cows, a Blairite meandering into the chaos of international worries. It sometimes takes a while for a ...”

“... ironically, starting with the jackalopes and the women who love them.And who, precisely, is Agnes Martin? Her semi-obscurity is exactly the point. True, her paintings now reside in all the fabled modern collections and sell for millions of dollars. True, like O’Keeffe she lived near Taos and Santa Fe for much of her life. But she remains a cult figure ...”

“... how the story goes. The real point of the crown is that your psychosis has the world to itself. Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) opens with three gangsters on the road and a noise coming from the boot of the car. There is a corpse there who is not quite dead. The two older gangsters (Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci) take care of this problem, and the ...”

“... Bergson and Benjamin. With her repetitions and outrageous banalities, she is a clear forerunner of Andy Warhol, and though she didn’t become really famous until she was in her fifties, her fame has certainly lasted longer than fifteen minutes. Alone among the literary avant garde she has entered popular idiom and not only with a ‘Rose is a rose is a ...”

“... and he passed it on to subsequent artists who were also wayward performers, such as the German Martin Kippenberger and the American Mike Kelley. Appropriately, the Polke retrospective currently on view at MoMA is called Alibis (it will open at Tate Modern in October and move to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne early next year). ‘Moderne ...”

“... the tabloid baton’.) The MP Chris Bryant protested that paying police was illegal. Andy Coulson, then editor of the News of the World, quickly stepped in, insisting that they operated ‘within the law’. The police didn’t follow up on Brooks’s remark; for much of the 2000s, the Met was on friendly terms with Murdoch’s News ...”