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“... on the subsidised theatre in England. Although he doesn’t entirely agree with this model, Martin Gottfried is a New York drama critic and his new biography of Miller certainly outlines the orthodox view. The second son of a New York coat manufacturer bankrupted in the Depression, Miller burst onto Broadway with four plays which called the ...”

“... became Beckett’s quasi-official theatrical representative in the US, causing critics such as Martin Gottfried to argue that it was ‘desperately important to break his hammerjack on staging Beckett’. In the last letter, a euphoric Schneider reports back on Billie Whitelaw’s success in Footfalls and Rockaby (playing ‘an old hag’ twice in a ...”

“... Amalia, a niece of Frederick the Great, began to gather writers at her court. In 1772 Christoph Martin Wieland was hired as tutor to the crown prince, the classic occupation of the late 18th-century man of letters. Goethe arrived three years later, fresh from the Europe-wide success of The Sorrows of Young Werther. He recommended another polymath, Johann ...”

“... otherwise only poetry does. It doesn’t even sound like a book I’d like. It’s the story of Martin Luther King’s murderer, James Earl Ray, mostly on the run in 1968, and mostly for a couple of weeks in Lisbon, spliced with reflection on a crisis (he of course doesn’t use such a word) in Muñoz Molina’s early life twenty years later, when his ...”

“... closer to the facts of the matter. Doris Lessing left behind two ex-husbands, Frank Wisdom and Gottfried Lessing, and the two young children of her marriage to Frank. Men do this all the time – desert the family, shall we say, in one form or another – but we assume, partly because of sloppy, ill-considered thinking and partly with some element of ...”

“... who styled himself Sahib-kiran or ‘world conqueror’ – and within, in the form of the Martin Luther-inspired religious reform which threatened to tear the Holy Roman Empire apart.Charles would rise to all these challenges. That he might be the monarch who would not only keep Christendom together but project it into new corners of the globe was an ...”

“... Germany’s first genuine bourgeois revolution. So, perhaps it’s a matter of class?The reason, Martin-Heinz Douglas Freiherr von Bora, is that you are all that we’re striving to leave behind, the kind of Germany of lords and ladies and generals’ sons and estates … I’m not even sure you are fighting for the same Germany I’m fighting for.The ...”

“... With the deaths of Thomas Mann in 1955 and of Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in 1956, a major era in the history of German literature comes to an end. These three are not only the greatest writers of their age, they are also its witnesses. Each of them worked in a different genre: Thomas Mann in the convoluted, partly essayistic prose of his novels, Bert Brecht in the drama and narrative poetry of social dialectics, Benn in the lyrical poetry of radical Modernism ...”

“... delighted. What mattered supremely were certain works of Goethe, the soberly-crafted fictions of Gottfried Keller and, first and foremost, the works of Tolstoy and of Dostoevsky. It was these two titans, instinct with the question of God and of human ethical imperatives in the face of God’s presence or absence, who led to St Augustine and to ...”

“... biographical publications on the most problematic of 20th-century philosophers, Hugo Ott’s Martin Heidegger: Toward his Biography stands out as the most detailed and scrupulously accurate. But caveat lector: there is a great deal here that we would not think of as conduct becoming a philosopher or the academic profession in general. It cannot have been ...”

“... in the Cloaca Maxima and other sewers. But the Via Salaria discovery was made in a new era. Martin Luther and other Protestants had mounted a challenge to the traditions of the church. Efforts to rebut their ideas had failed, and the support of rulers who converted had enabled some of the Reformers to build new churches of their own. At the Council of ...”

“... ask any questions. She ate her supper and remarked at one point that the new pop star Ricky Martin looked like a fake. A director who was with us had been the subject of two of her pieces for ‘Talk of the Town’. He later told me he realised at the party that Lillian didn’t think of him as a friend. ‘In a perfectly nice way,’ he said, ‘I had ...”