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“... than snapshots of the sitter as physically captured in a precise historical moment’. Bruce Bernard, who knew Freud from adolescence, also described the portraits as ‘prophetic’. ‘In the past,’ Blackwood wrote in 1993, ‘this was not so obvious because his prophecies had not yet become so dire and grim. When I used to sit for him nearly forty ...”

“... operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and Martin discuss Wagner’s influence on others: but all three are too little concerned with the peculiar nature and conditions of Wagner’s own musical-dramatic achievement. Why do so many musical terms, like ‘composed’, ‘resolve’ or ‘tonic’, also ...”

“... written by professors of English literature in Midland universities has received an accession. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Roman Persuasion is attended by so many coincidental links to David Lodge’s recent How far can you go? that to remark on them is almost unavoidable. By ‘links’ I don’t mean influence, for they are books of very different ...”

“... of French social security, Pierre La Rocque, described it in 1955. True, the Washington Post’s Bernard Nossiter, writing as recently as 1978, spoke of Britain: A Future that Works, advancing the argument that having wisely preferred a leisurely pace and a high quality of life to the hectic stresses of working hard, Britain was the foremost nation in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... legal steps have ever been taken. At the end of the book Rebecca Swift prints her interviews with Martin (Margaret’s son), and with Valerie and Peggy. Here Margaret appears in rather a different light. ‘We kids got rather fed up with these lengthy missives’ – this is Valerie – ‘as Mum would still be in her housecoat at midday, writing to Shaw, as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... made up of millions of quarrelsome, naive and opinionated people. Without this unpleasantness, as Bernard Williams once observed, important and worthy political projects would fail. There is no question of a politics of pure authenticity or uncontaminated sincerity. So, if hypocrisy is still a vice in the political realm, it has to connote something more ...”

“... once valued for something in addition to profit. She offers a brilliantly ambiguous quote from Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of LVMH (Moët, Hennessy, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Dior and more): ‘What I like is the idea of transforming creativity into profitability.’ Rampant profitability required a rethink. In the 1950s, 200,000 women wore ...”

“... In Martin Scorsese’s Casino, Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) remarks that Las Vegas is about ‘selling people dreams for cash’ and, in a memorable elaboration of this cliché, that ‘it does for us what Lourdes does for hunchbacks and cripples.’ Much the same has been said about the culture of cinema, and how Scorsese’s film stands in relation to its subject is an interesting question ...”

“... is the magazine whose identity was moulded during the Thirties, under the editorship of Kingsley Martin and after the merger with the Nation. Yet the New Statesman had almost two decades of existence before that, under an editor whose length of tenure has been exceeded only by Martin’s. A handful of disconnected facts ...”

“... of the 19th century. Lotto was re-created as a Renaissance neurotic in the likeness of the age by Bernard Berenson, who wrote a book about him in 1895. (‘I happen to have a temperament,’ Berenson grandly wrote, ‘which inclines me to forgive much in an artist like Lotto.’) Since then he has often had the dubious honour of being considered one of the ...”

“... to have been generally neutral, and sometimes hostile. Frank Kermode recalled (in an LRB review of Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread) that he knew several intelligence officers who thought it would be no bad thing if the Russians were defeated while serving to wear down German military capability. Up until the German invasion the SIS had agents in place in Moscow ...”

“... well. It also calls to mind a point made about the spirit of this time by its earlier chronicler, Bernard Levin in The Pendulum Years: ‘It was a credulous age, perhaps the most credulous ever, and the more rational, the less gullible, the decade claimed to be, the less rational, the more gullible, it showed itself.’ Angela Carter’s assertions will ...”