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“... The first work of collaboration between Edith Oenone Somerville and her cousin Violet Martin (‘Martin Ross’) was a Buddh dictionary – ‘Buddh’ being the family word for members of the family, and the dictionary consisting of words peculiar to it. ‘Blaut’, for instance, in Buddh circles, meant ‘violently to express immoderate fury ...”

“... writing together is – to me at least – one of the greatest pleasures I have.’ This is Violet Martin writing to Edith Somerville in 1889. It was Martin who rather timidly courted Edith at the beginning of what became a matchless collaboration of equals, and produced the best novel that ever came out of the ...”

“... he is rather hard to place, both as political leader and in the history of the Labour Party. Martin Westlake’s biography does much to place him and certainly encourages the reader to reflect on the recent history of the Labour Party. It is not exactly an official biography, but it is sympathetic (though not uncritical) and was written with Kinnock’s ...”

“... economic. It is to the surprising, and perhaps ominous, recrudescence of biologism that Andrew Ross devotes some of the most interesting chapters of The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life. Ross makes some shrewd and witty criticisms of recent exclusions by natural scientists into sociobiology, such as those of Richard ...”

“... to Ireland was so suppressed as to be historically impossible. It is one of the many merits of Martin Adeney and John Lloyd’s excellent The Miners’ Strike that it, too, has a strong sense of history. As it needs to, since so many of the actors in the 1984-85 miners’ strike were all too conscious of their historical role: Mrs Thatcher and the ...”

“... the architect Aldo Rossi’s office building at Celebration as ‘our own La Défense’. Andrew Ross relates that a few years before that Rossi had broken off discussions with Eisner about designing a building for Euro Disney, declaring: ‘I realise I am not Bernini. But you are not the King of France. I quit.’ Instead of a back-story they had the five ...”

“... I’ve never met​ anybody who hated as many people as Lillian Ross did. She would count their names off on her fingers, regularly within spitting distance of them, and her voice wasn’t quiet and she wasn’t shy. Bending back each digit and making a face, she’d offer a defining word after each name:Gloria Steinem – phoneyJanet Malcolm – pretentiousRenata Adler – crackpotSusan Sontag – nobodyNora Ephron – liarOther hand:Kenneth Tynan – creepTruman Capote – leechGeorge Plimpton – slickTom Wolfe – talentlessPhilip Roth – jerkIt was a mercy she only had two hands ...”

“... London. Around this time he had begun working on his translations from the Iliad with Donald Carne-Ross, and published a poem in the New Statesman grandly titled ‘To My Fellow Artists’. He found the atmosphere in London exhilarating, admiring the work, like Look Back in Anger, being staged at the Royal Court, and the Free Cinema movement (‘free’ from ...”

“... capacity in two years. If you do these kinds of things you will come unstuck. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques in their introduction, written late last year, note this and admit that New Times ‘too easily conflated’ Thatcherism and the Post-Ford world. But even when these essays were being written all this was predictable: what is curious about New ...”

“... 1990s. Over the Barlow Clowes fiasco, the Government, represented by Ernst and Young, sued Touche Ross; over BCCI, Touche Ross sued Ernst and Young and Price Waterhouse. Over Atlantic Computers, Price Waterhouse sued Touche Ross. Over Wallace Smith, KPMG sued Coopers and Lybrand. Over ...”

“... Howell examines the presence of malaria in the work of Dickens and Henry James, concentrating on Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and Daisy Miller (1878). Both books were written before Ronald Ross proved, in 1897, that the malaria parasite was transmitted by the female mosquito’s bite rather than by miasma; each depicts the ...”

“... and style to New Times (1989), a product of Marxism Today. Indeed, Marxism Today’s editor, Martin Jacques, is a contributor to The Alternative. Both see the Eighties as representing a profound historical caesura: an epoch dominated by the October Revolution, classical social-democratic working-class movements, and a Keynesian-Beveridge political ...”

“... Graham’s ‘smirk’. A dapper dresser, Graham ‘usually reeked of Paco Rabane aftershave, as Martin Hayes always pointed out to us’. What the reader wants to know, of course, is whether Graham could have done anything about Adams’s drinking. He asks himself this question directly. The answer is somewhat ambiguous. ‘Who knows. Perhaps there were ...”

“... observers have been ‘surprised’. In 1935, 1936 and 1937, years of many royal events, Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, was astonished at the ‘recrudescence of sheer superstition’ surrounding the monarchy. People endlessly spoke of ‘royal weather’; there was much publicity given to a crippled Scottish boy who learnt to walk ...”

“... Passage’ (Folio Society, £39.95) The first Englishman to try to navigate this route was Martin Frobisher, privateer, adventurer and blagger extraordinaire, who set sail from Gravesend in June 1576 with 34 men in three lightly equipped and, as Williams puts it, ‘alarmingly small’ boats. The expedition was financed by a group of 18 investors who ...”