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“... that raises intriguing questions about how the Northern Ireland peace process got underway.* ‘Martin McGuinness,’ Powell writes, ‘still denies sending the message stating that “our war is over” which started the correspondence with John Major, and it is pretty clear in retrospect that one of the intermediaries in the chain between the government ...”

“... other man had been there. The Christian variants of the tale of the evil mirror image centred on Eve, who was tempted by the serpent in her own image, persuaded Adam to look into a mirror with her, was depicted (from the 13th century) brandishing a mirror, and was accused, by Tertullian and others, of having invented the mirror. Devils, too, use mirrors; one ...”

“... the book. Could the cosmic wires have been crossed and could the spiritualist have been talking to Martin Seymour-Smith? For this massive biography of Hardy – or ‘Tom’, as Seymour-Smith chummily calls him – has the vehemence of divine revelation and the fervour of personal mission. ‘I wrote Hardy,’ the author explains in a remarkable press ...”

“... Beria in December 1938. Every one of the Commissars of State Security (Grades 1 and 2) on the eve of the Great Terror was shot before it was over. Of the 634 known NKVD officers with State Security rank when Yezhov went to the execution cellars in April 1940 (allegedly charged with being a British spy!), only 43 had held office in the pre-Beria ...”

“... issue of Tate magazine (where they are juxtaposed with One, inadvertently printed upside-down). Martin Maloney says: ‘He put himself in his painting through his inventive gesture. It’s funny how we visualise his making method when looking at a work, which we don’t do with any other artist.’ And Julian Schnabel says: ‘Looking at Pollock’s ...”

“... soul of the country’. His reading of the English scene may add grist to the mill of Martin Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, but that will certainly not detract from its appeal. While Richard Muir, an academic geographer turned freelance author, is writing for a popular audience, Ian Simmons and ...”

“... from the fin-de-siècle drowning sensation. More serious victims might also try turning to Martin Thom’s careful and deep fathoming of a similar great transition two hundred years ago: the birth of modern nationalism. There is more to be learned on that particular subject here than from most contemporary fulminations, not excluding my ...”

“... William, Prince Harry and Kate Middleton – Middleton’s 155 times, including on Christmas Eve and Valentine’s Day. Goodman said that during the last two years of Coulson’s editorship – Coulson resigned in 2007 after Goodman’s conviction – every story was a result of hacking. (In a memo to a manager in April 2004 listing his hacking ...”

“... existential fear and trembling. (Subtext in these opening paragraphs: having inordinate if not Martin Amis-like dental bills of late – on top of all the moving expenses – have decided to come out as auto-odontophobe.) Life really would be simpler without them. Just gum everybody to death. One’s own, one gathers, are going to outlast one. Obviously ...”

“... than the script for a video nasty. Young male novelists routinely seek to give maximum offence. Martin Amis did so in 1975 by calling a novel Dead Babies. In The Wasp Factory Banks recounted acts of child-on-child sadism in a deadpan. Holden Caulfield monologue which suggested that serial killing was a minor rite of passage, as insignificant in adult ...”

“... has spent 38 years on his own, because his wife and daughter were killed in an air raid; Martin, a forlorn little boy neglected by his shoddy parents. They are all portrayed with skill, insight and sympathy that at times becomes moving. But something seems to have gone wrong. The author’s sensibility seems to be at odds with Clare’s, in a ...”

“... out of the major studios, and although John Ford’s Stage-coach resurrected the genre on the eve of World War Two, Westerns reappeared as Hollywood bread-and-butter, not as big-budget extravaganzas. (The Big Trail in 1929 was the blockbuster flop which introduced and starred John Wayne – and confined him to B-movies for a decade.) The wartime Hollywood ...”

“... artist of the early 21st century, a Frenchman with the curiously American-sounding name Jed Martin. Such a backward-gazing Künstlerroman invites comparison with the trajectory of the author himself. And Houellebecq also includes a character bearing his own name and more or less corresponding to his public image as the sad bad boy of French ...”

“... is the strongest part of the novel. The plot of Metroland, what there is of it, is reminiscent of Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers: virginity lost amid cool, egotistic wisecracking. But Barnes’s hero is nicer and his tone more humane than Amis’s. And the verdict on the Sixties is, if somewhat half-hearted, a tolerant one:   ‘It’s really not a bad ...”

“... he took off for Alabama, where he was struck by ‘an impressive 26-year-old cleric, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’. Harangued by the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser about the hypocrisy of the Northern states, Kyle slid in a question about King. The editor looked ‘awestruck’. ‘That,’ he replied, ‘is an authentic intellectual.’ It was ...”