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“... Beatles’ most fertile period was when they were under the dual (and somewhat divided) control of Brian Epstein and George Martin, both of whom had set out to manufacture a marketable product rather than inspire great musical achievements. A recent biography of Epstein emphasised the four musicians’ profound relief when ...”

“... by 24 pounds of various substances twice a day for two weeks. (With admirable judiciousness, Brian Levack, the author of The Devil Within, warns that ‘the veracity of such reports can be questioned on a number of grounds.’) Some young women’s limbs grew so stiff that the efforts of several muscular men proved insufficient to bend them, while others ...”

“... Lestat a Premium Stake- holder Vampire (PSV), bloods him and then he goes into the fire.   With Brian Boyd who knows the story, Lestat makes his     Mother Gabrielle a vampire. Lestat encounters   Armand’s coven. Lestat makes a tidy sum, a killing. Lestat gives Renaud’s Theater to four vampires who, with   Nicolas Bourriaud, turn it into the ...”

“... secret back-channel talks with Catholic priests, the Derry businessman Brendan Duddy, and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin. After Mountbatten’s murder in August 1979 and the killing, hours later, of 18 soldiers at Warrenpoint – the army’s heaviest single loss in Northern Ireland – Thatcher asked Maurice Oldfield, the recently retired head of ...”

“... remaining evidence of his limited practice. The writings he left are, judging by the account Brian Lukacher gives of them in Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England, voluminous but opaque, incoherent and cloudily speculative.* (When he entered into an ill-judged defence of his employer in the Guardian the architect James Spiller said ...”

“... crap out there.’ His opinion of The Keepers of Truth? ‘A bit gruesome.’ Not as gruesome as Brian O’Doherty’s The Deposition of Father McGreevy, however, a novel which made the reviewer in the Evening Standard blush: ‘the unspeakable subject matter … we needn’t go into.’ In the opening pages of this delightfully sinister novel, the ...”

“... Martin Amis begins this collection of ‘left-handed’ (i.e. journalistic) pieces by deploying two standard topoi. The first is the modesty topos, duly described by Curtius, though under the tendentious title of ‘affected modesty’: ‘I am inadequate to the subject; I haven’t really done enough work, etc.’ ‘Oh, no doubt I should have worked harder,’ writes Amis, ‘made the book more representative, more systematic, et cetera ...”

“... as the dutiful and adoring son. At least there is no such nonsense about the home-grown memoirs of Brian Inglis. A child of both the Irish Ascendancy and of the Empire, he does not try to conceal that he regarded both his parents as total strangers, finding his prep-school headmaster’s instruction to kiss his mother (when she suddenly arrived from ...”

“... party or continue as a front for the IRA. Ignoring renewed protestations from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness that Sinn Fein is separate from the IRA, that it is a political party with a democratic mandate from its voters, most politicians and observers have, like Major himself, accepted almost without question the Unionist formulation: Sinn ...”

“... and éclat’. The Times warns of the ‘danger of getting trapped in a successful formula’. Brian Sewell of the Evening Standard ends the page by saying the same and adding that the paintings of this ‘precocious prodigy’ speak ‘only of provincial inexperience’. These ladies and gentlemen of the bench of metropolitan critical adjudications ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was reported by the only survivor of the massacre in Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar. It is repeated in Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust and is used in D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, both of which Darville admits having read. Five days later, subterranean whispers of plagiarism had turned into a shriek. Not only did The Hand That Signed the Paper open with a ...”

“... salsa rhythms and what Leonard calls ‘glitzy crap’. This glitz was the leading feature of Brian De Palma’s remake of Scarface, with its play on luminous surfaces in which blood, neon and Miami sunsets finally merge into a single crimson garishness. The same glitz features in the current TV hit, Miami Vice. Mafiosi are usually portrayed as dressing ...”

“... electoral pundits could barely find enough superlatives for the role played by Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen in the party’s triumph. Ahern, they said, was a ‘political tsunami’, and Cowen, if anything, even more formidable. This time around, neither Ahern nor Cowen was standing, rightly fearing the vengeance of the electorate. Cowen’s awe-inspiring ...”

“... States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day in July’ – a covert imputation and ...”