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“... when we were in support. The Hun put over some shrapnel-registering shells, I think. Willie Martin and I were in command of Support trench with 3 platoons (Willie is our second captain – a ripping fellow, a regular officer) we got the men in dugouts and were returning to the telephone dugout. We heard the usual whizz and I dropped down and Willie ...”

“... Martin Chuzzlewit, in the Dickens novel, crosses the Atlantic in a packet boat. When it reaches New York, newsboys come aboard shouting out the latest in their papers: the New York Sewer, the Stabber, the Plunderer and so on. ‘Here’s the Sewer’s exposure of the Washington gang,’ one cries, ‘and the Sewer’s exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old, now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse ...”

“... with scales, live in caves, love to hoard treasure and, of course, breathe fire. George R.R. Martin found a neat solution to an old problem with dragons. The now standard layout is a cumbersome four legs and two wings – after all, dragons need six limbs to walk as well as fly, don’t they? Not necessarily. As one can see in some episodes of Game of ...”

“... on Clarke: From: [Redacted] Sent: 25 May 2005 17:34 To: Coulson, Andy Cc: Weatherup, James Lewis has had a tip that Home Secretary Charles Clarke is having an affair with his blonde, attractive special adviser Hannah Pawlby. He got this from a Westminster insider who fancied Pawlby, was going to ask her out and was told, ‘Don’t bother wasting your ...”

“... Primary Colors, whoever the author, is a first novel. If so, it’s the best fictional debut since Martin Amis. There isn’t a slack line or a flat character in the book; even walk-ons like the Stanton family doctor, ‘thin almost to the point of consumption, and tilted somehow, like the Tower of Pisa, wearing a cape and a hat and small round glasses, like ...”

“... and even thinking or reading about them for too long may induce ‘nausea, clinical nausea’. So Martin Amis in ‘Thinkability’, the introduction to his collection of stories Einstein’s Monsters. The monsters are the weapons – but also ourselves, who are ‘not fully human, not for now’. Given such a premise, the weapons must be written about by a ...”

“... glinting eyes, in Reynolds’s 1778 portrait, stare fixedly past us from the dust-jacket of Peter Martin’s biography. Indeed the book’s steady prose, for all its professions of admiration, does little to suggest that Martin (the first writer to undertake a life of Malone since 1860) has managed to muster much of the ...”

“... Beale Street where the rackety blues clubs are, and the streetsweepers who ply it every day. Furry Lewis, one of his most affecting portraits, was one of the Deep South’s most important country blues artists. But blues doesn’t pay you a living, so, even though handicapped by an artificial leg, Lewis had to earn his ...”

“... And now Eddie Stobart fans drive thousands of unnecessary miles a year for sightings. Emma Lewis, a recent contestant on The Weakest Link, said that her hobby was ‘collecting Eddie Stobart lorries’. And what, Anne Robinson asked, do you do with them? ‘Nothing,’ Emma replied. ‘I prefer the Volvos to the Scanias,’ Ena Poulton of ...”

“... parallel tradition of para-literary works, from Carroll to Conan Doyle to Stoker to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Pullman. There’s no other body of literature quite like it: just consider the comparative absence of fantasy from the French and Russian traditions. And yet it’s perfectly normal for widely literate general readers to admit that they read no ...”

“... you?’ Pnin is moved: ‘The vicissitudes of celebrity!’ The ‘celebrated work’ in question, Martin Eden (1909), turns on those same vicissitudes. The hero is a self-taught writer who rises from anonymity much as London had, then kills himself out of disenchantment. ‘He was the fad of the hour,’ Martin thinks near ...”

“... separated and sealed into coffins; both escape   but fail to find each other on YouTube. Ruark Lewis would     like to be their friend, but first must face his past.     Akasha and Enkil make other arrangements;   they are worshipped, of course, they have 666 friends in common, but are trapped for many years so other vampires   get to ...”

“... best scene manages to get the landmines in too. The warriors are Paul (Delroy Lindo), Eddie (Norm Lewis), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr) and Otis (Clarke Peters). Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) has belatedly joined them. They have been trekking through the jungle for a day or two and (with the exception of David) aren’t as young as they were. Tempers ...”

“... and Underground Men of more recent literary fantasy. In Technics and Civilisation (1934), Lewis Mumford identified mining technology as the key to the world-view of modern science. Mining robs raw nature of its colour, shape and symbolic significance, and converts it into lumps of mineral ore to be torn out and exploited. The more traditional view of ...”

“... 1517. The main actor belonged to a religious Order known as the Hermits of Saint Augustine, Martin Luther by name, though he also tried out a hybrid Greek/Latin polish for his surname by dressing it up as ‘Eleutherius’, ‘the freed man’. This kind of personal rebranding was a humanist affectation then common among university lecturers; some of ...”