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“... or kill them later,’ she sang with unmistakeable emphasis. ‘I’m not non-violent!’ she told Martin Luther King, when they first met. In private and in public, she didn’t back down from her bow-wow position; her deracinated behaviour was in some way a barometer of the American madhouse. On 13 August 1967 in Detroit, two weeks after a five-day race riot ...”

“... had already attempted to colonise the fringes of Scottish Gaeldom with civilising Lowlanders, as Martin MacGregor’s essay in the collection edited by Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheál O Siochrú makes clear. From Giraldus Cambrensis to the chronicler John of Fordun, medieval commentators from Britain had demonised the Gaels for their barbarous ways. Such ...”

“... to Victoria Park, led by giant papier-mâché models of Adolf Hitler and the National Front’s Martin Webster. The route passed Brick Lane, scene of recurring clashes between the Front and the local Bengali population. Red Saunders was the compère. He had grown enormous sideburns, and wore a hat covered in badges and a ‘Mr Oligarchy’ cape. The punk ...”

“... in the genre, whether it be the prototypical Odysseus, the 16th-century French peasant Martin Guerre, who has to displace an impostor, or Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, who is received so badly that he relinquishes all claims, including to his own name: ‘But now I am buried underneath the living, under papers, under acts, under the whole of ...”

“... have to vote for me’. She won. Nearly four decades later, she still sits as a Labour MP.None of Andy Beckett’s other ‘searchers’ – stalwarts of the Labour left – does. Jeremy Corbyn is out of the party and won as an independent at the last election; John McDonnell had the whip suspended in July for voting against the new Labour government to scrap ...”

“... with train tunnels and trains coming through them), horse-riders, deer and madonnas. Estate of Martin Ramírez The critical milestone to which I refer was an exhilarating, even rhapsodic review of the 2007 exhibition of his work at the American Folk Art Museum, in which Roberta Smith, senior art critic at the New York Times, declared Ramírez ‘one of ...”

“... had her in mind when he included the verse ‘Look at that gal shake that thing./We can’t all be Martin Luther King’ in the second edition of his anthology, The Poetry of the Negro; the lines were originally written for the first issue, in June 1960, of the Student Voice, organ of the Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee, by its editor Julian ...”

“... she took me instead. I stood outside South Africa House waiting, while she disappeared into St Martin-in-the-Fields. I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was doing and she didn’t tell me. I used it as a key scene in my novel, The Dream Mistress. I remember it very clearly. Even so, It was a jolt to hear it being confirmed by someone else. Confirmed, but ...”

“... be ancient monuments. They’re actually part of an installation or a series of installations by Andy Goldsworthy, who put up a hundred or so similar folds as Cumbria’s Millennium Project. It was an expensive do, costing £500,000 or so, and involved shifting the boulders down from the fells with earthmovers besides building the folds that surround ...”

“... capitalism had become dominated to an extraordinary degree by what the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, writing in 2010, called a ‘ruinous trust in land speculation as the route to wealth’. Some effects of this are well known. London houses (mine and Wolf’s among them) rose ten and more times in value over twenty years. Here was an unearned ...”

“... Girl, the movie about Edie Sedgwick, the ultimate 1960s poor little rich girl. The film opens with Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) in a confessional box – always a good start – telling his priest how sad he is that someone else, not him, got to be punched at a party by Norman Mailer. ‘Why can’t I be punched by Norman Mailer?’ says the artist. Lennon is ...”

“... I would only add that using words like ‘inversion’, ‘warped’ – or, in a piece on Andy Warhol, ‘abnormal’ – doesn’t help matters along. This type of bracketing, in which ‘minorities’ appear as footnotes (however long) to white male heterosexual experience, is surprising in view of Hughes’s frequently slated political ...”

“... meum’; Joyce at a fancy-dress party where he managed to wangle first prize dressed as Handy Andy, Joyce reciting Yeats and saying, ‘No Surrealist poet can ever equal this for imagination’; Joyce commenting on a picture of the Christ-child, ‘Doesn’t he look as if he had just robbed the hen-house’; Joyce weeping over his beloved daughter ...”

“... On 16 March 1810​ a Mrs Martin, a ‘labourer’s wife’, was working a field near Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon when she turned up an old gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides ...”