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“... These are the MPs who are beloved of the whips, the so-called lobby fodder, and according to Martin Bell in A Very British Revolution, they are also the MPs who tend to claim the most for expenses: ‘There was nothing they wouldn’t claim for or, when the division bell sounded, vote for.’ Many of the current ...”

“... the fridge. A strong reminder that where a writer lives can be powerfully significant is given by Martin Bell (1918-1978): ‘Why, Leeds is Hell, nor am I out of it.’ Unfortunately, this sort of browned-off tone does for a good deal of the verse in Bell’s Complete Poems. Peter Porter writes that ...”

“... in progress. What, for instance, would Gore make of Christine Hamilton? What would he make of Martin Bell? Too British to be true, the pair of them, in very different ways. It was a relief to learn that several of Vidal’s hours here have been spent discussing Montaigne (so he said) with Michael Foot. Sadly, when Vidal showed up on one of ...”

“... Church, whose activities on the wilder fringes of the Conservative Party prompted the ex-newsman Martin Bell to take his white anti-sleaze suit out of the cupboard again in the 2001 election. The congregation is still there and keeping busy. But Brentwood’s pride is its Roman Catholic cathedral, astonishingly enough built between 1989 and 1991 and ...”

“... not the other. Kathleen Raine and Ruth Pitter cannot be found in O’Brien, but Elma Mitchell and Martin Bell cannot be found in Armitage and Crawford. Elma Mitchell’s ‘Thoughts after Ruskin’ is a revelation, and to put her in is to do exactly the sort of thing anthologies are meant to do: extend the terrain as they go over it. These books are also ...”

“... Andy Martin is unlikely to convince many readers that Napoleon conquered Europe only as compensation for his inability to write a sentimental novel. His attention to the Emperor’s literary ambitions is, however, not unreasonable. Napoleon dreamed of literary as well as military glory, wrote copiously at various moments in his life, and had real talent for it (Sainte-Beuve called him ‘a great critic in his spare time’, while Thiers elevated him to ‘greatest writer of the century ...”

“... by Gunner Baldie (c.1830). ‘The Tailor’s Coverlet’ by James Williams (1842-52).PreviousNext Martin Myrone, one of the show’s curators, cautiously suggests that the figureheads, with their ‘chunky modelling’, ‘emphatic characterisation’ and ‘vernacular energy’, ‘might be considered as the exemplary form of folk art, construed as an ...”

“... Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and judged accordingly. They treated her as a kind of peg-top doll, a sailor doll with blue eyes, ‘a thought unnaturally wide open,’ or, at best, as a child. Neither ...”

“... the dark. Stumbling, you reach out for something to hang on to and find that you are pulling at a bell rope, that the bell is waking up the entire town, and soon other towns far beyond. Within weeks you, the inadvertent bell-ringer, are both famous and infamous, and famous not for a few ...”

“... sworn to tell the truth here. Later, Berisha recalls seeing Serbian paramilitaries in the bell-tower of the church: milosevic: I am asking you whether you saw them shoot at anyone. berisha: Not only once, but many times. I saw it with my own eyes. And to go from one house to another, you had to go in the shadow of the walls. The reply continues for ...”

“... On 29 June 1989, a security manager for the US telephone company Indiana Bell received an anonymous telephone call. In a menacing tone a young man’s voice informed him that he had planted bombs in several switching systems known as 5ESSs. ‘They’re set to blow on a national holiday. They could be anywhere in the country – it’s a sort of competition, a security test ...”

“... believe and – to deform the famous formula – suspend our belief?Consider the celebrity of Mary Bell. How many times did outraged journalists cut straight from their disapproval of the money she was paid (making profit out of the most hideous of crimes) to the pleasure she was said to have taken in murdering Martin Brown ...”

“... and a participant in a chain of other destructive, if not sadistic, acts. The younger girl, Mary Bell, was equally pretty but eerily self-controlled and thought to be the more intelligent and influential of the pair. Bell was found guilty on both counts of murder. She was described as ‘psychopathic’ and ‘very ...”

“... Linda Wagner-Martin, a highly respected scholar of American literature who teaches at the University of North Carolina, was bewildered by the hostile reception in Britain of her biography of Sylvia Plath, published in 1987. Not only had she run into major conflicts with the Plath estate, she explains in her preface to Telling Women’s Lives, but some critics saw her as both an ‘unethical commercial writer’ and a radical feminist ...”

“... 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 ...”