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“... to literary agents than that they are merely low and intrusive. In his Irving to Irving (1974), Charles Madison credits them with a major part of the responsibility for the present fallen state of the American publishing industry. (Madison’s book traces a completed cycle from Washington Irving, who helped his publisher with money in an emergency, to ...”

“... start with the column itself, note how its bulky force seems to cede to the calm solidity of St Martin-in-the-Fields, how both structures dwarf Sir Francis Chantrey’s statue of George IV, and how the unfinished column, in extending out of frame, becomes the sign of a future to which, at least in this picture, neither crown nor church measures up. And then ...”

“... amassed, gathered up between life and death, and shot forward.According to the art historian Charles Colbert, the usual practice of painters in this period ‘was to let the horizon fade into visual and conceptual insignificance’. But in Homer the horizon does not recede; it pitches forward, towards our world. A red spot is not the glint of a setting ...”

“... he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A.K. Laidlaw’. We tend to think of the subject of this biography as the greatest voice of modern Scottish literature; more accurately, he is the greatest ...”

“... room and sordid surroundings which are all he has to offer her. It is not much of a marriage. Martin is not particularly affectionate nor particularly faithful, and as Paulina turns out to have no children she is in no position to ask for anything better. Yet gradually a touching picture emerges of a quietly courageous young woman, able to make friends of ...”

“... such mayhem. Five Points was built over the soupy landfill that had once been a polluted lake, and Charles Dickens observed during the 1840s that ‘all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.’ The mysterious name merely denoted the intersection of Baxter, Worth and Park Streets, now buried beneath the city courts. The Points have had many ...”

“... He married his cousin Mary ‘Minnie’ Sedgwick, and set to work fathering six children: Martin, Arthur, Nelly, Maggie, Fred and Hugh. Appointed the first headmaster of the newly established Wellington College, he made a reputation as a personality in the Arnoldian mould (his sermons were collected and published under the title Boy Life, Its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... something was awry with the premise of a people solidly arrayed against their government. By 1956, Charles Bohlen, US ambassador to the USSR, was arguing that Soviet citizens, now relatively satisfied with their political and social system, knew little about émigré groups abroad and didn’t much like what they knew. Even NTS was becoming discouraged, as it ...”

“... not ruined by redevelopment, or having friends with a sense of humor? One great virtue of Charles Taylor’s discussion of our values is that it escapes the narrowness of what is conventionally thought to be moral, and looks much more broadly. Another notable advance is that he goes beyond merely stating intuitions, and both shows how they used to be ...”

“... Irish Frankenstein’. Usually the creature appears with his middle-class friend, John Bright or Charles Parnell, who cowers in his threatening shadow. But at least once, in 1843, Punch’s monster is on his own, and it’s easy to see how Elizabeth Gaskell, along no doubt with an increasing proportion of the public, came to believe that the name ...”

“... fluency. It’s this evenness of texture that is the basis for the charge that he writes too well. Martin Amis has described the effects created by Updike’s prose as being like cinematography – ‘rich, ravishing, and suspiciously frictionless’. The most memorable piece of Prac Crit performed on Updike comes from Mailer’s novel Tough guys don’t ...”

“... was 35 and stricken with malaria in what is now Indonesia when, in 1858, he wrote a letter to Charles Darwin in England that would send Darwin into a tailspin. In a feverish ‘flash of light’, Wallace had independently stumbled on the theory of natural selection. Darwin had been working on the idea for some twenty years, but had not yet ...”

“... and Melopotamos, who had said that he was either a knave or a fool for sounding a bit like Martin Luther on justification. It is amazing that anything got done at all, and indeed more than once the whole event nearly ended in disarray. For some of the period covered by the council’s gestation and deliberations, the pope was formally at war with ...”

“... doesn’t mention that they also brought six goshawks, two horses, four falcons, ‘one living martin’ (presumably as opposed to the dead furs), one crane and – mysteriously – two pelicans. The pelicans were kept in the king’s menagerie in St James’s Park, where three years later John Evelyn ‘examined the Throate of the Onocratylus or Pelecan ...”