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“... For anyone with a teenage daughter their scabrous subject-matter is hard to take. They would scare Martin Amis. It needed a true appreciation of literary talent to spot their quality. The same true appreciation ensures that the prose in the LRB rarely falls below a certain standard and that the level of argument is kept up. Not all of the best LRB writers are ...”

“... or the directors. I send them thank you notes and good wishes, and today comes a lovely card from Martin Freeman, whom I don’t know, but who is so good about the monologue he did (A Chip in the Sugar) that I want to write back and thank him, thus making it like an extract from A Lady of Letters, a thank you letter for a thank you letter. I’m so pleased ...”

“... Cunningham makes the mistake of laying fictional extracts by Sartre, Malraux, Cyril Connolly and Graham Greene alongside factual accounts which blast them off the page. The Chicago reporter Jay Allen catches the tail-end of the Badajoz massacre, where the bull ring was inches deep in blood, and he watches a workman stopped in the street to have his shoulder ...”

“... Lara Feigel unravels the tangled web, concentrating on the experiences of six novelists: Bowen, Graham Greene, Henry Yorke (who wrote as Henry Green), Rose Macaulay, Rosamond Lehmann and the Austrian émigrée Hilde Spiel. The combination of danger and novelty made the times ‘an absolute gift to the writer’, as Yorke put it to Lehmann: ‘Everything is ...”

“... boom’ of the 1960s has overshadowed. It included his exact contemporary the cartoonist Pont (Graham Laidler) and Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That, which came out in the same year as Pillar to Post. The contrasts are instructive: 1066 and All That is an in-joke, all the facts are wrong and the book is only funny if you know the right ...”

“... possible. Circle, an ‘international survey of Constructive art’ edited by the architect Leslie Martin, the Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo and the abstractionist Ben Nicholson, was published in 1937. Although they roped in a few contributors, such as Herbert Read, who were willing to give the Surrealists (for example) the time of day, only ...”

“... the modern game. Manchester United was next to float, in 1991, immediately making £6 million for Martin Edwards, the majority shareholder, who sold a slice of the shares that had originally cost him and his father about £600,000. United were anticipating the windfall to come the following year, when the rights to broadcast Football League matches on ...”

“... cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No self-respecting museum would present a combination which was so insouciant art-historically, but it does look very good. The second room is Gallery 12 nearby, diagonally traversed by Dan Flavin’s 1968 piece, knee high and fifty-odd feet long, coolly ...”

“... at the top of the televangelist league continue to roll in, Falwell, like his predecessor Billy Graham, has had to dilute the fundamentalist message in favour of more traditionally conservative positions. FitzGerald traces the first of these shifts to the 1980 election campaign, when Falwell’s Moral Majority backed Ronald Reagan. This decision to enter ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and overwrought prose. ‘Carlo feels he is at the crossroads where time and eternity meet.’ Graham Greene is writhing in his grave. ‘He contemplates the nature of truth, but a definition eludes him.’ The reader is writhing in her armchair.The question is: is the book dreadful because Jennie Erdal wrote it as Naim Attallah, or because Jennie Erdal ...”

“... Britain for quality science fiction; what it now needed was a distinctively British approach.James Graham Ballard hadn’t read much science fiction during his boyhood in Shanghai’s International Settlement (he had just turned eleven when the Japanese invaded in December 1941), or his topsy-turvy adolescence (split between a Japanese internment camp and an ...”

“... violations of Palestinian rights as a result of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Martin Peretz and Michael Walzer wrote their ‘Israel Is Not Vietnam’ article, Ramparts was closed, and soon the American ‘Left’, with Walzer and Irving Howe leading the vociferously pro-Israel shift, turned sharply to the right, and from there to ...”

“... of groups stretching from Ian Paisley’s branch of the Unionists through to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and whoever they officially or unofficially represent. Typically, this ‘peaceful solution’ seems to involve shuffling Northern Ireland into a closer relationship with the Irish Republic and trying to get the spectrum of political groups to ...”

“... were in this vein. His Girl with Fig Leaf, etched in Aix in 1947 using tools given to him by Graham Sutherland, is a close relation of his paintings and drawings of Garman at the time. Among the best-known of these are his strange strangling sitter Girl with a Kitten (1947, in oil) and the petrified-looking Girl with Leaves (1948, conté and pastel).Then ...”