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“... of horrible events – the shock not only of Edgar Graham’s murder, for example, but that of Eva Martin, ten years earlier, a soldier in the UDR and a schoolteaching colleague of Giti’s. Martin was murdered by Sean O’Callaghan, who later defected from the IRA and on his release from jail in 1996 was to become a close ...”

“... editions still appeared in the 20th century. (I myself was partly responsible for one of them.) Brian Cummings’s version has a certain memorial quality, partly because it answers so many questions about the book and partly thanks to the classic splendour of the OUP production, but it is unlikely to be the last. Thomas Cranmer and his fellow Protestants ...”

“... concepts to which the words can be attached. In The Promise of Artificial Intelligence, Brian Cantwell Smith tried to explain this by comparing a map of the islands in Georgian Bay in Ontario with an aerial photograph showing the islands along with the underwater topography. On the map, the islands are clearly delineated; in the photograph it’s ...”

“... an actual dispute about contemporary art was staged at the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each other. Afterwards I ...”

“... hubby his nuptial rites after disclosures at the wedding reception of past naughtinesses. There is Brian Everthorpe, a Nice Work refugee, still trying to flog his Riviera sunbeds, and this time equipped with mousy wife and brand-new video camera (the showing of the subsequent holiday home-movie at an end-of-tour reception is, however, the novel’s comic ...”

“... Pagans have been fighting for their survival for a long time. As Russell Belk points out, Martin Luther’s objections to gifts being given to children in the name of Saint Nicholas prompted him to introduce Christkindlein – ‘the little Christ child’, a messenger of Christ – as the gift-bringer. (Belk doesn’t point out the historical irony ...”

“... well exhausted.’ A man who feels like this about parsnips is likely to enjoy such books as Martin Green’s Children of the Sun, in which people like Harold Acton and Brian Howard and Cyril Connolly, and all who profess to believe that heterosexual affairs are ‘the mark of state-subsidised undergraduates’, are ...”

“... to a close: every few months came a further contribution – not a few of them from the pen of Martin Amis – to a subject which is widely supposed to be exhausted. To suppose it exhausted is not to be unable to suppose that its new works may be pathfinders: the subject presents both faces. At all events, I swallowed my anxieties and tackled The ...”

“... upper-middle class, in fact. Ann Thwaite points out that the tyrannically aristocratic Sir Brian Botany, in Now we are six, is humiliated by his social inferiors, and comforted after his discomfiture by finding his right level as ‘plain Mr Botany, B’. The strange thing about the popularity of Milne’s children’s books is the obviously reassuring ...”

“... and a half since he was around – generations earlier than other rock’n’roll deaths like Brian Jones or Janis Joplin. Greil Marcus does not seem to have met Uncle Vester. Indeed, on page 71 of his new book he admits that he has never even been inside Graceland. (‘There is a good deal in this book I cannot explain,’ he wisely concedes.) But he has ...”

“... Indeed, its very legitimacy is at issue. The grief of the two boys’ bereaved families – Martin Brown’s and Brian Howe’s – weighs heavily against what good this book might do. Sereny’s second examination of this crime must therefore be established as an irrefutable necessity. Any failure here may bring into ...”

“... passes over. A specifically Jewish vein of it, stretching from Ernst Bloch and Gustav Landauer to Martin Buber and Herman Cohen, has recently been excavated by Russell Jacoby in Picture Imperfect.* Curiously, neither Jacoby nor Jameson mentions the latest Jewish thinker to inherit this tradition, Jacques Derrida. Theodor Adorno, whom Jameson does discuss, is ...”

“... At the time of the Wessex computer scandal, he said, Mrs Currie’s husband Ray and his brother Brian were senior executives at Arthur Andersen. Mrs Currie was incensed by this reference, and complained of misuse of Parliamentary privilege. When I asked her whether the Secretary of State had given a misleading reply very much to the advantage of Arthur ...”

“... idealised. It is as full of violence, illusion, futility and sexual frustration as any of Martin McDonagh’s wicked parodies of the traditional Irish play. As the years of prosperity rolled on, some of the more doctrinaire modernisers grew increasingly contemptuous of their own history. The suggestion that aspects of traditional Irish culture were to ...”

“... him by the militantly modern, urban Irish literati, as it is sometimes held against authors like Brian Friel and Seamus Deane. This is because in their case, but not in his, the backward glance to rural Ireland is associated with a currently unfashionable republicanism. On Canaan’s Side is a less impressive piece of fiction than A Long Long Way and The ...”