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“... in the face of the permissive Sixties, Humanae Vitae and the abolition of National Service. Julian Barnes’s very much à la mode Metroland is divided into three sections: I Metroland (1963), II Paris (1968), III Metroland (1977). Current fashions apart, the narrative circuit is familiar from Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra ...”

“... and readers of the country’s stuffiest newspaper. Sparrow succeeded with elegance and wit, a Martin Fagg of academe, a large master of minor form. The form in Words on the Air is the talk. Most of the pieces here were first commissioned for the radio; one was a university sermon; others began as guest lectures. The book starts, perhaps ...”

“... Hockney’s correspondence on the subject over the last two years, chiefly with the art historian Martin Kemp, author of The Science of Art (1990), a magisterial study of painting and optics. David and Martin, seemingly unedited, exchange chitchat, aperçus and mutual encouragement between Los Angeles and Oxford, artlessly ...”

“... Julian Barnes’s recent best-seller, Flaubert’s Parrot, quotes a letter from Flaubert to Feydeau: ‘When you write the biography of a friend you must do it as if you were taking revenge for him.’ Sir Moses Finley has been my teacher, colleague and friend for close on twenty years, and while I am not intent on taking revenge on his behalf, I can’t claim to be able to write dispassionately about his work, on the occasion of the publication of his new book, Ancient History: Evidence and Models, and of the republication in paperback (with additions) of Democracy Ancient and Modern and The Ancient Economy ...”

“... than a novel. On the other hand, it does have going for it the very considerable glamour of fact. Martin Amis’s memoir Experience – published to harrypotterish levels of excitement and with an amazingly clumsy serialisation – is autobiographical writing of a very high order, well towards the life-over-art end of the spectrum. ‘The trouble with ...”

“... Face Death’ (The Egyptian Book of the Dead). There were lists of events and classes: ‘Ego with Julian Baggini’, ‘Urban Gardening’, ‘How To Be Cool’. There were also some stuffed black birds, and eight birch trunks fixed upright between the floor and ceiling – four in a window bay and four further back near a leopardskin-print chaise-longue. The ...”

“... proudly displayed (as are the many builders’ cracks in the drawing), Barry Fantoni, Nick Newman, Martin Honeysett, Willie Rushton … the list is long. Most of this, including the strips, is topical, socio-comic work, or lunatic observational – the country seen from another planet – or simply anarchic. Scarfe and Steadman, the two high executioners, were ...”

“... Nick Vaux, who led 42 Commando Royal Marines in the Falklands, waited only for his brigadier, Julian Thompson, to write No Picnic before weighing in with March to the South Atlantic. Vaux is now a general. He writes lucidly, robustly, as befits a soldier, but is not ashamed to reveal his inner feelings (or to mention how, in a scramble up the ...”

“... He has come into all the material collected by John Lehmann’s commissioned biographer, Martin Taylor, who died before he could write a word of it. He has seen photocopies of the extensive diaries, and he has interviewed the survivors and their descendants. Lehmann himself wrote three volumes of dignified autobiography about his work, his ...”

“... sum, is our culture’s chief pictorial repository for the so-called human condition. John Rupert Martin, Kenneth Clark, H.P. Chapman and E.H. Gombrich (respectively) were, each of them, writing out of a scholarly knowledge of the 17th century. Nonetheless, their terminologies raise a major problem: does the strength of our emotional response to ...”

“... a book, he needs the images. But Jim is certainly no Keith Talent, the unlovable character in Martin Amis’s London Fields who Fast Forwards and ‘SloMos’ through his nightly video, scanning for digitised images of sex, ‘astronomies of breast and belly, of shank and haunch’. Jim, by contrast, is conscience stricken and easily put off his stroke: a ...”

“... monitor, that watching-machine. ‘The Enlightenment and the Revolution it helped spawn,’ Martin Jay wrote in Downcast Eyes, his historical survey of the rhetoric of vision, may ‘be justly said to have expressed that privileging of sight so often taken to characterise the modern era in general.’ By ‘so often taken’, he is referring to the ...”

“... libertarianism of Herbert Spencer and F.A. Hayek, and the technological optimism of Herman Kahn or Julian Simon, post-scarcity anarchism asserts that, given existing and prospective technologies, there are no insuperable natural limitations to the growth of human population, and no forms of scarcity that cannot be overcome by scientific innovation and ...”

“... once, and swore never to be so again. He was always a controller, and sometimes an exterminator. Martin Gayford and Geordie Greig’s accounts of Freud’s behaviour reminded me at times of two unlikely novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the ...”

“... and he passed it on to subsequent artists who were also wayward performers, such as the German Martin Kippenberger and the American Mike Kelley. Appropriately, the Polke retrospective currently on view at MoMA is called Alibis (it will open at Tate Modern in October and move to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne early next year). ‘Moderne ...”