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“... Stockton, whose only claim to literary eminence is to have been in the same class at school as Martin Amis. But here O’Hanlon sees his angle. Stockton runs a seedy casino in Kensington, and as a photographer specialises in the nude pin-up. His darkroom writhes with portraits of naked girls. From a tree in his back-garden he hangs an image of his ex-wife ...”

“... and shows, panel sessions, exhibitions, sight-singing with the ’61 Glee Club, rowing on the Charles ... all culminating in ‘Commencement’, the graduation ceremonies for the Class of 1986. We were, to be sure, an interesting class, the first one to graduate in the Kennedy years, a transitional period between Eisenhower conservatism and the ...”

“... family. Some of the posters were ‘political’: ‘Diana – the only jewel in the crown’; ‘Charles, you’ve lost the best thing you ever had. Good luck to Wills and Harry,’ said one poster stuck to the railings of Buckingham Palace. As many people noted, the whole atmosphere was very ‘democratic’: rarely can the railings of our royal palaces ...”

“... politicians mingled freely at the Mitre and Mermaid clubs and at the taverns associated with them. Martin Butler has demonstrated the prominence of playgoing in the shaping and sustaining of the political outlook of the Caroline gentry. Beneath that social level, as one would never guess from the standard social histories of the period, huge audiences watched ...”

“... Lyme Regis where he writes very long books, such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Daniel Martin (1977) and A Maggot (1985), which sometimes get made into films and make him a lot of money (large parts of the Journal are filled with his totting-up of income and expenditure). It may have taken him a while to achieve the success he feels he ...”

“... Over the years, the story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was ...”

“... made out. Desire for ever more amazing spectacles was universal, exemplified by the career of Martin Beckman, a Swedish mercenary tasked with arranging fireworks for Charles II’s coronation in 1661; he held the post of royal fire master for the next forty years. Unfazed by confessional differences, Beckman put on ...”

“... nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, whose long-smouldering rivalry as to whose was the greatest Macbeth of the age had culminated in clashes between a 15,000-strong mob and a detachment of the National Guard. Nowadays the neighbourhood hardly looks like the front line in New York ...”

“... He will tell us nothing of real interest about his wives, mistresses or kids (although he chucks Martin the odd walk-on here and there), or about any living loved-ones – a species defined by him as those who have emotional claims on me’. He doesn’t want to hurt types like these, he says, or hurt them any more than he already has (mind your own ...”

“... it certainly has increased the awareness of the museum in that age-group.’ Meanwhile, however, Charles Mill, the V & A’s Marketing Manager, told the trade magazine Campaign that the publicity was ‘a bit élitist’. He wanted the posters talked about in wine bars. ‘I believe,’ the Director told the press, ‘we must communicate not just with those ...”

“... belatedness. Even ‘Fundamentalist Classicism’, the name given by the architectural historian Charles Jencks to the trend in post-modern architecture represented by Leo Krier and Aldo Rossi, does not represent an attempt to recast modernity, only to reclothe it. And whether post-modernism is seen as problematising the entire category of the aesthetic, or ...”

“... Witness the use made of his ‘epistemes’ by N.C. Gillespie, who, in his recent study of Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (1979), implied that there were only two epistemes worth talking about: the ‘positivist’, with its exclusion of metaphysics and natural theology, and the ‘creationist’, which was ultimately, if not ...”

“... Land, the Cantos, Williams’s Paterson and Bunting’s Briggflatts were Louis Zukofsky’s A, Charles Olson’s Maximus, Allen Ginsbert’s Howl, the substitution of ‘breath’ for metre and gossip for metaphor. Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, with their sedulous imitation of the faux-naif Modernism of e.e.cummings, were just as much part of the ...”

“... F.S.L. Lyons, doyen of historians of modern Ireland, when faced 27 years ago with a short life of Charles Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty – had already published a radical ...”

“... hysteria, but can only manage a rather smutty slapstick. Detectable here is the influence of Martin Amis, whose gleeful nastiness in the bedroom has become quite a touchstone for many youngish male novelists. The book is elsewhere littered with sentences that are straight Amisian repro: ‘Then there was money: it seemed money had taken a look at ...”