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“... you just have to think of England. It may be embarrassing, it may be awful, but it exists. Max Porter’s Lanny – his second novel – is partly about an idea of England. It’s set in an unnamed village, ‘fewer than fifty redbrick cottages’, within commuting distance of London, a place that is ‘a cruciform grid with the twin hearts of ...”

“... Something Back. First published in 2012, this revised edition is prefaced with an introduction by Max Porter, who sees it neither as a ‘sweet’ nor ‘easy’ book, but as ‘an essay about minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years’. The first section begins in the immediate aftermath of Jacob’s passing: ‘Two weeks after the death’, then ...”

“... Max Porter​ ’s compact and splendid book, a polyphonic narrative with elements of the prose poem, cracks open a set of emotions that has become spuriously coherent and tractable. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, in which a being that resembles Ted Hughes’s Crow appears to a bereaved husband and his sons (the father happens to be writing a critical book about Hughes), qualifies as a novel by the familiar logic of its not fitting any other category ...”

“... create healthy individuals in a healthy body politic. In Germany, the master of miasmatism was Max von Pettenkofer. He believed that visitations arose from local configurations of natural conditions: variations in atmosphere, soil, the water-table, climatic vagaries. Formulated in this way, the doctrine was far more fatalistic than in Chadwick’s ...”

“... views about hopes and fears, and the social-historical essays edited by Ralph Houlbrooke: Roy Porter, the historian of medicine. Both in his recorded conversation with Dinnage, who is a research psychologist by discipline, and in his academic essay, ‘Death and the Doctors in Georgian England’, Porter exhibits a ...”

“... a whip-financed political press was breaking up even before the First World War. Northcliffe and Max Aitken, later Beaverbrook, were both on the scene by 1914 – despotic, destructive, uncontrollable tycoons of a new sort. As ‘the system lost confidence in itself,’ especially during the great constitutional crises of 1912-14, the ruling élite found ...”

“... Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, Norman Bluhm and Fairfield Porter. It all made for a vigorous little scene, a fair bit of it played out at the Cedar Bar, then on 9th St in Greenwich Village, where, as O’Hara would later write, ‘we often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue and gossip.’ It’s a world ...”

“... was always very good at making me feel that what I was saying was interesting,’ Max Porter has Bacon muse in his new short book, The Death of Francis Bacon, which imagines the artist’s mind as he lies dying in a clinic in Madrid in April 1992.*) Interviews with Francis Bacon is at its most absorbing when Sylvester’s questions are ...”

“... specific bodily sites and pathological events. Rey retraces the conceptual underpinnings for what Max von Frey called the ‘doctrine of specificity’ to the rise of neuroanatomy in the Scientific Revolution. In the 18th century the great Swiss-born physiologist, Albrecht von Haller, clarified the distinction between muscles (endowed with irritability, the ...”

“... once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith-helmets,’ the columnist Max Boot wrote in 2001. Central Africa shows Britain up rather badly, not as a particularly malevolent colonial power but as a pathetically ineffective, often duplicitous and not very brave one. No wonder so many of the relevant records, as Murphy reports, were ...”

“... single word.) Sometimes he is just playing: ‘I have nothing to offer you/but my only pair of Air Max 90s.’Femi’s dexterity with spacing, slang and syntax is evidence of his acute aural vigilance. His poems conjure or capture everyday sounds: ‘boys whose names sound like the rip of duct tape’; ‘sweet nonsense chatting’; ‘sliced plantain ...”

“... day. Included in her indictment are Jan Troell’s 1996 biopic of his later years, Hamsun, with Max von Sydow playing the elderly author, on the whole sympathetically; Ingar Sletten Kolloen’s first, two-volume version of his biography (2003-4) which has now appeared, abridged and translated, as Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter; and Robert Ferguson’s ...”

“... the end of a hallway lined with untidy stacks of case notes in wrinkled cardboard folders Martyn Porter, a senior surgeon and the hospital’s clinical chairman, waited in his office to be called to the operating theatre. He fixed me with an intense, tired, humorous gaze. ‘The problem with politicians is they can’t be honest,’ he said. ‘If they ...”

“... Body and Soul (1925), with a new jazz score performed by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. (Max Roach has composed music for another Micheaux silent, The Symbol of the Unconquered.) There are now the two books and at least two more are on the way. There is, as yet, no Micheaux biography, although his story is compelling. His parents were born in slavery ...”

“... covered Europe with graves, ashes and tears.’ Appropriately, The Battle won the Prix Goncourt. Max Gallo’s million-selling quartet of novels, by contrast, gleefully embraces the myth of the ‘grand homme’ in its most lurid, overblown form. If Rambaud displaces the focus from Napoleon to the ordinary men and women drowning in his wake, Gallo places the ...”