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“... presence in the world didn’t dim.Secularism, reason, scepticism don’t bring disenchantment, Thomas Laqueur argues in this monumental study, the harvest of more than ten years’ concentrated exploring of archives, tombstones, battlefields and furnace design. Laqueur principally scrutinises developments since around 1700, mostly in England, but he places ...”

“... Hours (1955) or Cape Fear (1962). (Both films were remade in the 1990s, by Michael Cimino and Martin Scorsese respectively; Haneke himself remade Funny Games in Hollywood in 2007.) The difference is that the criminals in The Desperate Hours or Cape Fear have a motive for assaulting the family, whereas in Funny Games they terrorise for the sake of ...”

“... functions keep pace.’ But the big daddy of over-reaching superheads is the remarkable Sir Greg Martin, executive head of Durand Academy in Stockwell, south London. As Margaret Hodge noted in a spectacular Public Accounts Committee session in January, Martin was until recently running a dating agency from the school ...”

“... and Warburg, one of Britain’s best-known general trade publishers. The firm was begun in 1910 by Martin Secker, and rescued from bankruptcy in 1936 when Frederic Warburg joined as a partner. Warbarg went on to build an outstanding list and was independent to the point of being a trade maverick. (It was Secker and Warburg who took on Animal Farm after ...”

“... Gothic designs for the University of Glasgow, Thomson expressed unqualified admiration for Thomas Hamilton’s Royal High School in Edinburgh (1825-9) and Harvey Elmes’s St George’s Hall in Liverpool (begun in 1841). His own Caledonian Road Church and Moray Place display more imagination than even these works, with many details that seem to have no ...”

“... South African politics. Lee says only whites ask him about the meaning of the two quotations, from Martin Luther King and Malcolm, at the end of Do the Right Thing, and only whites need to ask, he claims, why the uncommitted character played by Lee himself chooses to start a riot by hurling a rubbishbin through the window of the pizzeria. The quotation from ...”

“... a large loan exhibition of the Welsh ‘father of English landscape’, Richard Wilson, curated by Martin Postle and Robin Simon. It is a magnificent show, the first on this scale for more than thirty years. It will be at Cardiff until 26 October, and it is accompanied by a sumptuous catalogue, the fullest, most faithfully reproduced collection of colour ...”

“... month, titles came out by Laing and Esterson, Willmott and Young, J.K. Galbraith, Maynard Smith, Martin Gardner, Richard Leakey, Margaret Mead; psychoanalysts, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, historians, physicists, biologists and literary critics, each offering their latest thinking for an unspecialised public, and the blue spines on the pile of ...”

“... Fonseca, who is now 83, has been one of those famously reticent writers – he’s a friend of Thomas Pynchon – who chooses to say as little as he can about what his fiction is meant to mean. One of the distractions his biography throws up is that he worked for the Rio police in the 1950s and 1960s: this is supposed to give him a licence to write about ...”

“... sentimentality which, at the Queen’s behest and with her all-too-active co-operation, Theodore Martin lavished on the Prince Consort; still less the ‘feline skill’ of Sidney Lee who, disregarding the advice of Edward VII, ‘Stick to Shakespeare, Mr Lee, there’s money in Shakespeare,’ produced a double-decker biography of his late majesty; least of ...”

“... publishing history offered by the Clarendon editor is absolutely crucial in the case of Martin Chuzzlewit, the latest volume in the series. This novel was put out at a turning-point in Dickens’s career. Because of the disappointing sales it produced, Dickens switched to Bradbury and Evans for his first-form fiction, leaving reprints with Chapman ...”

“... new Speaker. The advance was $4.6 million: not bad for an untried new writer. The row was not of Martin Amis proportions – this is not a very literary town – but there were some ugly whispers about conflict of interest. Mr Gingrich himself agreed to waive the advance in exchange for a share of royalties that will probably net him about the same. Nobody ...”

“... the everyday now, as indeed it must have done then.From his grandfather, the sightless Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma (common ancestor with the current Vice-President, whom Vidal refuses to meet because of his connection to Martin Peretz’s plaything, the New Republic), the boy became steeped in American political lore ...”

“... is with us still. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s appreciation. He received instead one of the rings of which Byron kept a plentiful supply to distribute to admirers. Noel was used to disappointment. An illegitimate cousin of ...”

“... years before the Battle of Waterloo. As a teenager, through the influence of his elder brother, Thomas, himself a gifted artist and architect, Paul Sandby was taken on as a military draftsman for the Board of Ordnance, producing reliable maps for use in the subjugation of the Highlands. By the time of his death, his astonishing industry had earned him many ...”