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“... is the strongest part of the novel. The plot of Metroland, what there is of it, is reminiscent of Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers: virginity lost amid cool, egotistic wisecracking. But Barnes’s hero is nicer and his tone more humane than Amis’s. And the verdict on the Sixties is, if somewhat half-hearted, a tolerant one:   ‘It’s really not a bad ...”

“... Rosie Lee Tompkins​ , born Effie Mae Martin in Gould, Arkansas in 1936, grew up picking cotton alongside her fourteen siblings and half-siblings. As was common for a child of rural sharecroppers, her formal schooling was limited, but Tompkins learned to sew by making bedcoverings with her mother, scrapping together any available pieces of cloth ...”

“... just as we remain dubious about the value of the ‘decorative’ in the visual arts. When Graham Greene made ‘entertainments’ a separate category from the hard stuff in his production, he rammed home the point: the difference was a moral one, a difference between reading to pass the time pleasurably – that is, trivially – and reading to some ...”

“... of historical rhyme, occurred. Elton John bought Watford Football Club and appointed the energetic Graham Taylor as manager. Taylor, looking for a way of fulfilling his boss’s ambition of making Watford into a First Division team, came across a statistical survey which showed that the majority of goals comes, not from intricate, aesthetically-pleasing ...”

“... politics were at work in pressing Obama towards war. A pair of Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and John McCain, have been given extraordinary prominence by the mainstream media as experts on foreign policy. They lead the militarised wing of the Republican Party, in spite of some defections from Tea Party renegades and freelance libertarians. And ...”

“... akin to being saved, achieved through the inspired oratory of an apostle, whether a Billy Graham or an Aneurin Bevan. Such spirituality found the material world quite repulsive. Thus Foot objected to the EEC because it would mean joining ‘the rich nations’ club’. And, of course, it would diminish the House of Commons, an unthinkable ...”

“... with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and echoes of De Quincey, Shelley, Frankenstein (not sure about that); and then on to Samuel Palmer to Wuthering Heights to Ford Madox Brown to George Eliot to Whistler to Edwin Drood (I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sometimes making their escape through the ‘Devil’s portgate’ or female genitals. St Martin of Tours once exorcised a man by thrusting his arm down his throat and forcing the demon to exit through his anus. Catholic exorcisms were a matter of supply and demand: their effectiveness increased their popularity, which helps explain why there were so ...”

“... Stockton, whose only claim to literary eminence is to have been in the same class at school as Martin Amis. But here O’Hanlon sees his angle. Stockton runs a seedy casino in Kensington, and as a photographer specialises in the nude pin-up. His darkroom writhes with portraits of naked girls. From a tree in his back-garden he hangs an image of his ex-wife ...”

“... be assessed, or because it finally has been. There are also some welcome defining presences. W.S. Graham is well represented with different poems in both anthologies, restoring a seminal poet to rightful prominence. There are omissions, especially of poets who challenge received opinions, particularly about the Forties and Fifties. We won’t find, for ...”

“... network and ‘reach out and touch someone’ in ways entirely unforeseen by Alexander Graham Bell. Speculating about the impact of such artificial erotic experience, Rheingold turned to an already up and-running technology – to ‘telephone sex’, the adult party lines where you pay to make conversation with a member of the preferred ...”

“... Hemingway shot himself. His death is the only regret of my magnificent career.’ The cartoonist Martin Rowson got the last laugh in the Independent on Sunday, with a riff on the ‘body of literature’: ‘And yet where are Publishers in this Corporeal Plan?/You’ll see them as a TAPEWORM if you do a CT scan.’ Alongside these lines was a caricature of ...”

“... Since Success, Martin Amis has been involved in a spectacular case of alleged plagiarism. As the apparently aggrieved author, Amis showed himself notably unresentful and unlitigious. Indeed, he took the offence as an occasion to ruminate good-naturedly on the oddities of literary ‘borrowing’. It’s relevant to bring this up since Other People depends very largely on a trick which is usually thought to be someone else’s trademark ...”

“... coined by Italians, but used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were ...”