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“... the pool at Cliveden during a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference) and the saintly Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman published a grovelling interview. Meanwhile opposition voices were silenced and political prisoners tortured; Hasan Nasir, a Communist, died as a result. In 1962 – by now he had promoted himself to field-marshal – Ayub decided that ...”

“... as much as Les Misérables, which she had read before she was nine. She also read Jack London’s Martin Eden, a book about a self-taught writer which she later suspected had given her inspiration for her future life. A schoolteacher called Mr Starkie, recognising an unusual capacity in the girl, lent her The Sorrows of Young Werther. She started keeping a ...”

“... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...”

“... to his body as a walking lab, pills slushing against potions in his insides. Ten years earlier, Martin Amis had reviewed one of the first British documentaries about Aids for the Observer. Aids, he wrote, ‘is a visitation that makes you believe in the Devil’: With Aids … it seems to be promiscuity itself that is the cause. After a few hundred ...”

“... free from either apology or hostility; he would have agreed with the simple definition of it by Martin Riesebrodt, the most level-headed recent sociologist in the field, that religion is essentially an appeal to superhuman powers to avert misfortune, overcome crises and furnish salvation.3 That did not preclude admiration for the Reformers and their ...”

“... beats for, the city does not care who fulfils its various functions,’ he writes, like a satanic Richard Scarry. If he is one of these streaming figures, one of these replaceable shadows, what better project can there be but precise documentation?If this is his sense of the city, his sense of the Earth is religious, evangelical even. ‘The setting was wild ...”

“... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”

“... political chaos in Italy and then of the warring factions in Greece was nothing short of masterly. Richard Crossman, then assistant chief of psychological warfare at AFHQ, concluded in a shrewd single sentence: ‘I suspect it was in Algiers, where he could do all the thinking and take all the decisions while Ike took all the credit, that Harold Macmillan ...”

“... late 1950s together with his teenage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. In the movie Holly meets Kit (Martin Sheen) in a South Dakota town: ‘Little did I realise,’ she tells us over an image of her twirling her baton on the street, ‘that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the badlands of Montana.’ When her father ...”

“... over the next ten years, with $110 billion right away, of benefit particularly to Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. The State Department celebrated the deal as supporting ‘the long-term security of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region in the face of malign Iranian influence and Iranian-related threats’. But the last few months have seen a series of changes ...”

“... which served to distinguish him from his companions (Elisabeth Becker of the Washington Post and Richard Dudman from the St Louis Post-Dispatch). As a Scottish nationalist, he wrote that he found DK’s wish to ‘make new things Cambodian’ quite sympathetic – yet far too crudely and chauvinistically anti-Vietnamese. This sentiment, Kiernan notes, was ...”

“... of today – in Maigret and the Headless Corpse (1955), a body is fished out of the Canal Saint-Martin, a scuzzy, violent, crime-ridden sump in the 10th arrondissement that today is one of the city’s most chichi, Bobo enclaves. There are other extra-textual resonances: the Maigrets live on boulevard Richard-Lenoir ...”

“... to describe how I felt. It​ was announced that there would be a memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields and my work was such that, if I could catch the midday train, I could be there, but, to be on the safe side it would mean making arrangements to leave ten minutes early. I had a delightful chief. Permission, I knew, would be granted, yet ...”

“... of bourgeois hipsterville surrounded by local landmarks from Lena Dunham’s Girls, enlightened by Martin Amis sightings. Back then, baby, Brooklyn was badass and more than a trifle déclassé. To come from Brooklyn – ‘I was fiercely patriotic about Brownsville (the spawning ground of so many famous athletes and gangsters)’ – meant that you had ...”

“... but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester ...”