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“... nobody gets kissed’. Twenty-five years after his death he receives a big wet one in the shape of Jay Parini’s biography, which comes with much fanfare designed to rehabilitate him as one of America’s great writers. A handsome ‘Steinbeck award’ has been set up by the writer’s widow; a South Bank Show has been tied in; ‘a year-long marketing ...”

“... that emerged in the 1980s as part of the backlash against ‘antipsychiatry’, particularly Martin Roth and Jerome Kroll’s The Reality of Mental Illness (1986).* Roth and Kroll wrote about Basaglia in the present tense though he had died six years earlier, and took him to be both a Marxist and of the opinion that psychiatric diagnoses were no more ...”

“... downstairs on the sofa, with the windows open. Then it happened – not to Joan Didion, but to Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Boytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, and Sharon Tate: On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend ...”

“... names, but few black Americans – and no black parents with sons – have forgotten them: Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old in Florida killed by a ‘neighbourhood watch volunteer’ who claimed to be ‘standing his ground’; Eric Garner, a 44-year-old in Staten Island killed in a police chokehold; Michael Brown, an 18-year-old shot dead by a police officer in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the civil rights movement, the figure who fulfils the legacies of Malcolm X as well as Martin Luther King. In Jay Z’s words, ‘Rosa sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so we all can fly!’ John ...”

“... for the Mission Continues, which has received donations from Bank of America, Disney, Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, Starbucks, as well as thousands of people. (This becomes important later.) I won’t go on about how wonderful he seemed. Not because there’s a lack of material. Here’s Eric talking to another talk-show host, Charlie Rose: ‘Oxford had ...”

“... some immense mail-order catalogue, whose pages they have only just begun to turn. But, like Jay Gatsby’s green light, their artificial paradise is destined to remain a promise of the future, a narcissistic fantasy. For all Perec’s stylistic sangfroid one can detect in this prose the shadow of a master whom he did not mention in his Warwick ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 somewhere; it would cost $4.50. ...”

“... punctuated by the incessant drip-drop of tiny signifying moments’. Some of these he recorded: MARTIN: Well, you gel orders to burn a village, and a gook tries to put the fire out while you’re trying to burn his hootch. He fucks with you, and you show him that you can fuck with him. You can push him away, or you can kick his ass, or you can do what we ...”

“... seems to owe rather too much to previous literary visions of Eighties New York – particularly Martin Amis’s Money and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities – to be really convincing. The commonsensical Raban slips far more easily into the complacencies of the sleepy Alabama town of Guntersville, to whose population of 6491 he seriously thinks of ...”

“... things, watching pop videos on MTV all the time, snorting furlongs of coke – utterly soulless. Jay Mclnerney’s Ransom has a central character who has fled from LA to Japan to escape his despised film-producer father and to discover some sort of integrity in the martial arts; the impression given is that spiritual fulfilment is not feasible in modern ...”

“... to remember how it started. Dial M for Murdoch is an invaluable account of its evolution, told by Martin Hickman of the Independent, and the MP Tom Watson. Watson has been particularly close to events. In September 2006, he spearheaded opposition within the Labour Party to Tony Blair’s refusal to schedule his departure from office. Since Blair enjoyed ...”

“... every major item of the creed. The most detailed survey of the Frankfurt School to date has been Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination, a masterly account which like most of its author’s work suffers from not arguing a case. Much the same can be said of Rolf Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School, which is more biography than critique. But this ...”