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“... epicene hero Sardanapalus as a model of regal behaviour. The books by Hermione de Almeida and Philip Martin are much more direct attempts to meet the challenge Byron makes to the literary critic. If he is a major poet, as not merely his reputation but the size and scope of his oeuvre insistently suggest, which are the great works? How far should we ...”

“... not be analysed in The Spanish Armada, published in 1988 by the underwater archaeologist Colin Martin and the historian Geoffrey Parker. Of the hundred or so books marking the quatercentenary of the fleet’s defeat, theirs stood out for its fusion of archaeology and documentary evidence: a triumph of rubber and tweed underpinned by collegiate spirit ...”

“... few people knew what a talks producer was or what he did. The magazine editors such as Kingsley Martin and Cyril Connolly, the editors of famous papers such as Michael Foot at the Evening Standard, the great publishers of the day, have all of them left their mark on the cultural history of the time. Their opposite numbers on radio remain to this day largely ...”

“... Friedrich, the young protagonist of Philip Hensher’s third novel, Pleasured, lives the sort of dismal half-life that was possible in Berlin before the Wall came down, the period when West Germans received subventions just for taking up residence there. It was a city that attracted the very old, who needed to bulk up their pensions, and the young, who wanted to study or just vegetate – or to escape compulsory military service (another advantage of living in Berlin ...”

“... They became, successively, the most influential publishers in the world: Philip Graham, who inherited the Washington Post from his father-in-law, Eugene Meyer, and his shy, self-effacing wife, Katharine, who took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960 ...”

“... In​ August 2006 I visited an architect friend called David Martin who lived near the town of Montignac in the Dordogne. He was in the middle of a complicated job converting the interior of a nearby château, which had been acquired by a wealthy Japanese client. One evening he produced a large and rather dirty wooden crate ...”

“... of Kafka’s; in addition, the father is party, we are told, to an intellectual debate about Martin Buber; we’re also told that he’s a friend of Stefan Zweig’s. But this specificity, even if it doesn’t develop much beyond these few references to an outside world, is not common in the books of yours I’ve read. Hardship generally fells your Jews ...”

“... Linda Wagner-Martin, a highly respected scholar of American literature who teaches at the University of North Carolina, was bewildered by the hostile reception in Britain of her biography of Sylvia Plath, published in 1987. Not only had she run into major conflicts with the Plath estate, she explains in her preface to Telling Women’s Lives, but some critics saw her as both an ‘unethical commercial writer’ and a radical feminist ...”

“... and even in conclusion – Mia Rodrigues-Salgado, for example, feels that the enterprise increased Philip II’s reputation, particularly in the north – but they all of course agree in trying to place the disastrous voyage in its context. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to know just where the borders of the context lie, and indeed where any historical ...”

“... an American cinema at the opposite pole from Disney’s – like another namesake, Travis Bickle, Martin Scorsese’s vigilante and Taxi Driver of 1975. The contrast between the characters is representative of the respective timbres of the directors’ work. Scorsese’s Travis takes out his frustration bloodily, on the streets; Wenders’s takes his out ...”

“... and unconvinced, marred in their judgments by a ‘fatal distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same ...”

“... of his emotions that a tender letter written in 1876 to console someone in trouble was assumed by Philip Henderson to have been intended to comfort either Edward or Georgiana Burne-Jones, while Kelvin believes that it may have been sent to Jane to commiserate with her on the end of her affair with Rossetti. Perhaps the most moving of the previously ...”

“... who in a single month, June 1789, discovered not only the papers of the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe, on which most of our knowledge of the working practices of the Elizabethan theatre is based, but the records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels from 1622 to 1642, a complementary treasure-trove on Jacobean and Caroline court ...”

“... historian and writer for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may ...”

“... The last letter​ Philip Larkin wrote was to Kingsley Amis on 21 November 1985. He was too ill to hold the pen himself and dictated it to be typed and signed by his secretary at the Brynmor Jones Library in Hull. He told Amis he was going into hospital that day for more tests – ‘only tests, but of course they are looking for something, and I bloody well hope they don’t find it ...”