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“... fluency. It’s this evenness of texture that is the basis for the charge that he writes too well. Martin Amis has described the effects created by Updike’s prose as being like cinematography – ‘rich, ravishing, and suspiciously frictionless’. The most memorable piece of Prac Crit performed on Updike comes from Mailer’s novel Tough guys don’t ...”

“... was 35 and stricken with malaria in what is now Indonesia when, in 1858, he wrote a letter to Charles Darwin in England that would send Darwin into a tailspin. In a feverish ‘flash of light’, Wallace had independently stumbled on the theory of natural selection. Darwin had been working on the idea for some twenty years, but had not yet ...”

“... and Melopotamos, who had said that he was either a knave or a fool for sounding a bit like Martin Luther on justification. It is amazing that anything got done at all, and indeed more than once the whole event nearly ended in disarray. For some of the period covered by the council’s gestation and deliberations, the pope was formally at war with ...”

“... doesn’t mention that they also brought six goshawks, two horses, four falcons, ‘one living martin’ (presumably as opposed to the dead furs), one crane and – mysteriously – two pelicans. The pelicans were kept in the king’s menagerie in St James’s Park, where three years later John Evelyn ‘examined the Throate of the Onocratylus or Pelecan ...”

“... sort of English do you choose? Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the schoolboy Charles Bovary’s trousers to be held up by braces, or do you want his pants to be held up by suspenders? The decisions, and the colouration, are irrevocable. So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its ...”

“... lust that knows no limit, no frustration, no prohibition and no death’. The Watcher by Charles Maclean, an Englishman’s novel set in the United States, has again to do with patterns. As in Pilgermann, they are huge patterns of cosmic significance centred on an individual life, discerned with excitement by a first-person narrator. This disturbing ...”

“... in the extreme. Nearly all the jurors were afflicted with vomiting or fainting. The inquest on Charles Bravo in 1876 lasted a month and provided his parents’ solicitor, George Lewis, with the national celebrity which made him the upper classes’ favourite, and most expensive, legal confidant. In 1865, Sir James Willes wept as he sentenced Constance Kent ...”

“... to the Crown and its courtiers, ‘projectors’ also gained political cover. In the run up to Charles III’s coronation, the Guardian flourished its discovery of a document recording Edward Colston’s grant to William III of shares in the Royal African Company, which shipped more enslaved people across the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an ...”

“... does bring happiness: poverty and wealth have both failed,’ says Kin Hubbard’s creation Abe Martin. Since the pursuit of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ has proved so perplexingly difficult in practice, discussion of the philosophical foundations of utilitarianism can easily appear to be otiose. Sometimes it seems obvious that the ...”

“... a series of biographical poems about scientists, inventors, engineers; a fair number of them – Charles Fourier, for example, and Wilhelm Reich – were completely crazy, though crazy in interesting ways. Enzensberger’s verse does two things superbly. It captures the mental states of its subjects (which often means their desolation or unhappiness), and it ...”

“... Hockney’s correspondence on the subject over the last two years, chiefly with the art historian Martin Kemp, author of The Science of Art (1990), a magisterial study of painting and optics. David and Martin, seemingly unedited, exchange chitchat, aperçus and mutual encouragement between Los Angeles and Oxford, artlessly ...”

“... overconfident wealthy dilettante, but Clark’s senior curatorial opponent inside the gallery, Martin Davies, and his chief enemy outside it, Charles Bell (who regarded Clark as a protégé who had betrayed him), were deeply distrustful of visual analysis, and their ideal of art historical scholarship consigned ...”

“... in progress. What, for instance, would Gore make of Christine Hamilton? What would he make of Martin Bell? Too British to be true, the pair of them, in very different ways. It was a relief to learn that several of Vidal’s hours here have been spent discussing Montaigne (so he said) with Michael Foot. Sadly, when Vidal showed up on one of Newsnight’s ...”

“... in particular, was, according to More, a compound of the worst heresies picked out of the books of Martin Luther. The first three essays in this book are circumstantial accounts of Luther’s attitudes: to a man’s right of resistance to the secular power, to the earthly and the divine kingdoms and governances, to justification by faith. How far and in what ...”

“... I did, I called a friend at the New Statesman. He arranged a meeting with the editor, Kingsley Martin, then at the peak of his glory, who said ‘Why not?’, explained that he conceived his typical reader as a male civil servant in his forties, and passed me on to the commander of the (cultural) back half of the mag, the formidable Janet Adam Smith. Her ...”