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“... Andrew Martin​ ’s Early Work functions simultaneously as a celebratory autofiction about literary life in the United States and an indictment of the generation that populates it. ‘Most of the people I associated with considered themselves exceptional,’ says Pete, the protagonist, and we may take this to mean above average or, simply, those to whom normal rules don’t apply: ‘So you work from, uh, home?’ ‘Yeah, I’m a bum,’ she said ...”

“... recently been the subject of a whole series of influential and subtle reinterpretations. While Andrew Martin’s work marks an innovation in the English criticism of Verne, he is much indebted to such Parisian predecessors as Roland Barthes, Michel Butor and Michel Serres. Moreover, The Mask of the Prophet is a sequel to ...”

“... encountered what he called the ‘social hierarchy’ in which Burgess and Blunt moved so easily. Andrew Sinclair helps to cut the moles down to size. The real intellectual élite in inter-war Cambridge, he reminds us, were not the moles or their contemporaries (mostly from the arts faculties) in the Apostles but the brilliant scientists at the Cavendish ...”

“... The road is a no man’s land on the edge of society,’ Rupert Martin wrote in 1983, introducing Paul Graham’s photo­graphs of the A1, ‘and its inhabitants – the staff of cafés or hotels, the lorry drivers, salesmen and others who ply the road – are often imbued with a solitary stoicism, a kind of self-sufficient melancholy ...”

“... He and Diane have been married for 37 years. They have another guest for the Super Bowl – Martin Dekker, a former student of Diane’s who now teaches high school physics in the Bronx. Martin’s a bit strange, a desexualised motormouth who issues vague pronouncements and is engaged in a sonorous and ...”

“... on the earth. I took everything to extremes in my old life.’ Alf is 33 years old. His friend Martin, a fellow Freegan, popped his head through from the back of the van and pushed his glasses up his nose. Martin is 36 and comes from Sydney. He said he was disillusioned as a teenager by the way everyone was obsessed with ...”

“... for Larkin and a bit of Bix Beiderbecke. Ten years later, at Stephen Spender’s wingding in St Martin-in-the-Fields, there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At ...”

“... In the Heat of the Night both starred Sidney Poitier, who always looks nice, but in the year of Martin Luther King’s death – an event which held up the ceremony by two days – it was quite something to see two films in which a black man appeared not only to assert himself but to do so with a certain degree of moral disdain. In the Heat of the Night has ...”

“... The 1990s don’t yet have a mood. They may forever be defined by the style they preceded, what Martin Amis, rather horrifically, called Horrorism. Others may see it as a last golden age of selling the silver and weeping over Diana and burning the dead cows, a Blairite meandering into the chaos of international worries. It sometimes takes a while for a ...”

“... questioned about fantastical crimes for which no evidence existed, Begg received a visit from ‘Martin’, of the Foreign Office. ‘Any complaints?’ Martin asked. This was not the first time Begg had met Martin. On the first occasion, Begg had been embarrassed at how badly dressed ...”

“... in their empty hands, Mama’s hands, and fell asleep under their caress.’ This is a solace that Martin, the fetishist, would keenly appreciate. It is in a glove, so to speak, that he experiences his first sensual encounter with Antoinette, the love of his life: ‘that little fabric hand that I could squeeze in my hand, put in my pocket, Antoinette’s ...”

“... in Military Affairs’. The phrase had been popularised in defence circles in the 1980s by Andrew Marshall, a former Rand analyst who headed the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. Marshall believed that new technologies in surveillance, communication and missile targeting had fundamentally changed the nature of warfare because they made it possible ...”

“... deceit. ‘I don’t know how I can demonstrate my remorse,’ Glass is reported to have said to Andrew Sullivan, the editor who hired him. Sullivan pointed out, not in so many words, that taking a giant book advance and allowing a film to be made from the story of your misdemeanours might not be the subtlest demonstration of remorse. Next came Jayson Blair ...”

“... 1517. The main actor belonged to a religious Order known as the Hermits of Saint Augustine, Martin Luther by name, though he also tried out a hybrid Greek/Latin polish for his surname by dressing it up as ‘Eleutherius’, ‘the freed man’. This kind of personal rebranding was a humanist affectation then common among university lecturers; some of ...”

“... on Remembrance Day? Would he kneel to the queen when he was admitted to the Privy Council (see Martin Loughlin’s piece on p. 29)? On the day after he was elected, he spoke at a mental health trust fun day in his constituency instead of going on the Andrew Marr Show. Later that day he was filmed as he hurried along the ...”