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“... European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg delivered its first judgment on 1 July 1961. Gerard Richard Lawless had been arrested four years earlier while attempting to travel from Ireland to Great Britain. Under a 1940 amendment to the Irish Offences against the State Act (1939), a government minister could order the detention without trial of ‘any ...”

“... of its male contributors used the phrase ‘my wife’. I made a dive for the most famous name – Martin Amis – and found myself reading a wafer-thin reminiscence about flying on a 737 which has to make an emergency landing. Amis describes his sensation as being ‘mainly, relief that my wife and child weren’t with me.’ Later he tells us that ‘my wife ...”

“... fucked-up teenager who despised everything she and her chip-off-the-old-block, conformist, Cliff-Richard-adoring teenage daughter smugly stood for. I do see how awful it was for her, but I hate her, still and nevertheless.She was more or less out of my life by 1962, but the ‘ordinary provincial English housewife’ pattern, which I hadn’t come across ...”

“... the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Both these spaces were industrial structures redesigned by Richard Gluckman, who is as much an architect of the Dia aesthetic – a Modernist transparency of structure rendered with a Minimalist sensitivity to space – as any of the artists.In 1994 Wright made way for Michael Govan, a protégé of Thomas Krens, the ...”

“... wrote about what he could see through his first-floor window: the three protruding masts of the SS Richard Montgomery, an American Liberty ship that ran aground and broke in two in August 1944, a mile and a half off Sheerness beach. The ship was carrying 1400 tonnes of explosives – enough to wipe Sheerness off the map, along with Southend and parts of the ...”

“... be seen.’Some special forces memoirs have been so popular they have led to pulp franchises. Richard Marcinko, the first commander of SEAL Team Six, later convicted of defrauding the US government, published his bestselling memoir, Rogue Warrior, in 1992 and followed it with more than a dozen thrillers fictionalising various SEAL missions. Eric ...”

“... His family had been established in Norfolk since the late 14th century; his father, Sir Richard, was a cloth merchant (or mercer), who had thrived first on the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey and then of Thomas Cromwell, and had been knighted for his success in procuring foreign loans. Richard even had the nerve to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... month, titles came out by Laing and Esterson, Willmott and Young, J.K. Galbraith, Maynard Smith, Martin Gardner, Richard Leakey, Margaret Mead; psychoanalysts, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, historians, physicists, biologists and literary critics, each offering their latest thinking for an unspecialised ...”

“... is this ensemble, stretching across a millennium and round thousands of miles of coastline, that Richard Fletcher has taken as his subject in The Conversion of Europe. What concerns him is not the conversion of this or that people but all medieval conversions (including conversions between Christianity and its two rival monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, which ...”

“... novel does’. After his death, in 1995, Amis took less of a battering than Larkin had. Martin Amis’s Experience (2000) softened the prevailing image of him as the meanest drunk at the Garrick, and Zachary Leader’s biography wasn’t unkind. Amis’s ogreish ways weren’t news anyway: annoying feminists and lefties had been, for him, half the ...”

“... this humiliating past. Henning, the birthplace of Alex Haley; the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated on 3 April 1968; Dayton, where John Scopes was convicted in 1925 for teaching evolution to his biology class. Tennessee still stumbles under the burden of being a Civil War battleground (the East was loyal to the Union while ...”

“... decided that ‘America mortifies its victims by depriving them of their characters,’ so that Martin Chuzzlewit, which began to appear serially a year after Dickens’s American Notes, has as its meaning that ‘promotion to institutional status is death to character.’ There’s no point arguing here against so flat a reading of either book, since it is ...”

“... say I was moving to Spitzbergen. The central figure in Harrison’s book about millenarianism is Richard Brothers, a late 18th-century reader of signs who believed he was destined to lead the Jews back to the Holy Land (‘sorting out the Jews is often a precondition of the millennium,’ Frank noted in passing). ‘Perhaps the value of knowing about such ...”

“... I hope scholarly ghost. The project was to write a history of the sculpture department at St Martin’s School of Art. Anthony Caro invited me to do it, and the idea was that the book would be a tribute to Frank Martin, the head of the department, and would be published in the year of his retirement. Caro and ...”