Search Results

“... once, and swore never to be so again. He was always a controller, and sometimes an exterminator. Martin Gayford and Geordie Greig’s accounts of Freud’s behaviour reminded me at times of two unlikely novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the ...”

“... born. Richler prints a vivid – and typically too-brief – extract from Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and psychological, in which his generation grew up in Britain: What attracted me then about Camber was less its ...”

“... Reviewing a new edition of Ulysses in 1986, Martin Amis had a few reservations about the book’s popularity with scholarly intermediaries. James Joyce, he concluded, ‘could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet ...”

“... the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi and station platform. Julian Barnes’s novels are depilated at source, fat-free. Frisking them for a Moorcockian digression, a set of cellulite-heavy parentheses, would be like checking a tub of margarine for a stray pubic hair. Smoothness, the absence of bumps and flaws and evidence ...”

“... this was a house where Bernal had for some years been living with Margaret Gardiner and their son Martin – then a most undisciplined small boy, but now, I understand, a highly distinguished Chinese scholar living in the USA and certainly heir to his father’s intellectual gifts. Bernal’s marriage to Eileen (which had produced a son and a daughter) was ...”

“... and lacks confidence in his aesthetic judgments (something that attracts him to his great friend Martin Amis is that Amis has no problem telling him what sorts of book he should like). But Hitchens has complete confidence in his political judgments, which are robust, intensely felt and invariably propped up by vast amounts of selective reading. He has ...”

“... head, more in sadness than anything else. ‘No,’ he answered. I later discovered his identity: Martin Schulz, now running against Angela Merkel. As he put it back in October, when president of the European Parliament: ‘I refuse to imagine a Europe where lorries and hedge funds are free to cross borders but citizens are not.’ Liam Fox resigned on 14 ...”

“... adhere to formulated myth, traditionally developed from such meetings.’ Bloom’s authority was Martin Buber’s distinction, in I and Thou, between the two primary words, I-Thou and I-It: When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through ...”

“... as venues for second-hand book-dealers. So Mohammed Arkoun should stop worrying. Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby’s book about Iznik pottery is more architectural in its concerns than someone unfamiliar with the history of Ottoman ceramics might have guessed, for the mass-production of the brilliantly designed and coloured fritware jugs and dishes is ...”

“... sadly not now; Marmur’s is good; Wall’s brings in the slightly unwanted flavour of a bad Dean Martin movie; Steegmuller and Hopkins deliberately duck the felinity (you could argue that the French is already drained of it anyway); while Russell and Davis, mixing banality and distant animality, have found the best solution. Probably. At least for the ...”

“... in the style which I originated, for years, when no works at all resembled mine but my own.’ Martin Hardie has defined that originality as an assumption of new technical licences. ‘The central tradition of watercolour meant nothing to Rossetti,’ Hardie observes. ‘He started out to hack his way to expression,’ achieving ‘an unusual ...”

“... was some sort of plan even before the Director was appointed is clear from the account given by Julian Spalding (now Director of the City Art Gallery, Glasgow) of his interview for the post. Sir Michael Butler, Deputy Chairman of the Trustees, told him that they, the Trustees, were looking for someone to carry out their policies. This is not, of ...”

“... after the Cold War’. In addition to Bradbury’s invented personages the conferees include Martin Amis, Günter Grass and Susan Sontag (she skips one of the later conferences in the narrative, on the grounds that there is something more interesting going on in Northern Italy). Bradbury’s Villa Barolo is funded by the American Magno Foundation ...”

“... novel, Moscow is the fount of spiritual nourishment, the known but unvisited other country, as Julian Mitchell terms it, in his play, Another Country. Fellow Travellers fits snugly with the success of the film version of the play, with the death of Blunt, and Britain’s continuing fascination with Thirties upper-class traitors. Worsley wrote the novel in ...”

“... 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 ...”