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“... packet of mail’ where I see a wrapped brie or camembert with the maker’s name, Eugene Martin, prominently displayed. It may be a parcel, of course. Without looking at the original, it is impossible to be certain, though even in reproduction the label looks printed rather than hand-printed like an address. At any rate, a parcel wouldn’t make ...”

“... rather than £24 million (the previous week’s total) or £10 million (the week before that)? As Martin Amis has pointed out in another context, though it is hard to say what difference would be made by having £40 million rather than £20 million at one’s disposal, it is easy enough to see that the difference is a cool £20 million. When the total reached ...”

“... an inch of difference between Labour and Conservatives, the one-time counter-culture celebrity Richard Neville said long ago, but it is in that space that we live. The opening weeks of the first Labour Government for a generation have been a daily reminder of how far Neville’s aphorism still holds. So tirelessly had Tony Blair strained to ratchet down ...”

“... else again. Whereas British political biography, with the (white) elephantine exception of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill is, almost as a matter of professional pride, a one-volume affair, there is a well established American tradition of monumentalism, based, it seems, on the assumption that a blockbusting person requires a blockbuster book. Caro seems ...”

“... how many prime ministers have got a body like this?’ There is a flirtatious edge to this. Martin Amis, in a piece reporting on Blair’s last weeks in office, also described himself flirting with Blair. Some men have that effect on other men; it’s not a gay thing exactly, but it’s not the opposite of a gay thing, and there is something faintly ...”

“... in the mid-century debate about the duties and burdens of African American writing initiated by Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). In essays such as ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, ‘Alas, Poor Richard’ and ‘Many Thousands Gone’, James Baldwin rejected the role of ‘Negro writer’ and ...”

“... might say, but not really fetching enough to stand against the assertion of his fellow-countryman, Martin J. Wiener, that the central issue for historians of contemporary Britain is that of poor economic performance. Some have seen the origins in the complacencies engendered, and the conservatism confirmed, in the Second World War: the war’s effect, in Angus ...”

“... only if long enough to mourn his own life. Of course, he will do more than that, and it is part of Martin Dodsworth’s task in Hamlet Closely Observed to examine the code of conduct, and the place of honour, in the life of the Prince and others, to bring out what might be called the under-examined social history of the play. But Hamlet, one way or ...”

“... translated as The Gunman, Manchette’s final néo-polar, whose protagonist is also an assassin. Martin Terrier is a contract killer who works for ‘the company’. The book’s title indicates Terrier’s preferred method of killing – couché or ‘prone’ – but also hints at a vulnerability. In Fatale, Manchette uses Aimée’s femininity to ...”

“... Arab state, ‘with full rights for the Jewish citizens’, while the most eirenic Jews, such as Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, hoped for a binational state, ‘a common motherland for these two semitic peoples’, as Magnes called it, though he too expected large-scale Jewish immigration. Richard Crossman, who was a ...”

“... historian.’ Bois later returned the favour when he asked Derrida to turn his notes concerning Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh into an article that Bois published in Macula, the journal he launched with Jean Clay in 1976. An Oblique Autobiography includes a stirring eulogy for Derrida, who died in 2004, and a scathing rebuttal of the insipid obituary ...”

“... series which concerns his finances, letters to his legal adviser, William Pyne, and to his tailor, Richard Culverwell. There has been a long upper-class tradition of owing money to one’s tailor – which, no doubt, explains the inordinate prices charged in those days. Disraeli, characteristically, went a step further and actually borrowed money from his ...”

“... that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?’ At the end of Carousel at the National Theatre, Richard Eyre escorts her to the door: ‘I’m glad you enjoyed the show.’ ‘I didn’t, I can’t bear the piece.’She was just as rude and inconsiderate in private, late to arrive and even later to leave which meant that nobody else could leave ...”

“... correlatives in literature’ – in Malcolm Bradbury, as it isn’t perhaps needless to say, and Martin Amis. Perhaps there is wisdom in Howard Brenton’s observation that what binds us together in this period is nothing more than ‘a profound unease’. It is here, approaching the end of his study, that Appleyard chooses, or is compelled, to make some ...”

“... fanfare for the ambitions of the sequence as a whole, and preferred to kick off with the gigantic Richard’s Feet, which traces the career of Richard Thurgo, a London solicitor, in post-war Hamburg where he is masquerading as an ex-Nazi. Back in England, Thurgo has been presumed dead for some twenty years after his body ...”