“... thinking, to deduce x: the identity of the murderer. Take, by way of concrete illustration, Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodging (1936). The president in question is Dr Josiah Umpleby, head of St Anthony’s College, Oxbridge (not to be confused with St Antony’s, Oxford, which wasn’t founded till 1950; Innes’s setting is a ...”

“... foreign cars, mock patriotism and advocate abortion and homosexuality on the other: so Thomas Frank argues in What’s the Matter with America? The main economic interest of populist conservatism is to get rid of the strong state, which taxes the population in order to finance regulatory interventions, and to introduce an economic programme whose slogan ...”

“... the Axis turned into a crusade to ‘roll back’ communism in Eastern Europe and Asia. One was Frank Wisner, a corporate lawyer who enlisted to work in naval intelligence early in 1941. When the US entered the war he was consigned to the tedium of the navy’s cable and censorship office in New York. Donovan rescued him from that backwater at the end of ...”

“... The Barracks (1963), The Dark (1965) – and in some of his best short stories. ‘Gugering,’ Frank Shovlin explains in a footnote, ‘is the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.’ Uncle Pat, he suggests, is a model for the fictional character ‘The Shah’ in McGahern’s final novel, That They Might Face the Rising Sun ...”

“... Kontakte, Momente, Telemusik etc etc?The extent of KS’s achievements emerges clearly from Michael Kurtz’s biography which appears in an excellent translation by Richard Toop. Kurtz records meticulously the genesis of all KS’s works to date and gives details of his global concert-giving activity. We may not be as aware of this in the UK now as we ...”

“... At the Party Conference following Labour’s crippling defeat in the 1983 election Michael Foot stood before the massed ranks of the faithful to account for his stewardship of the Party. ‘I am deeply ashamed,’ he began. Unfortunately for Mervyn Jones, who both loves and admires his subject and would have us dwell on other things, it is the freeze-frame of that moment which lives on ...”

“... One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness ...”

“... had changed since the end of the Revolution.’ Drawing on recent work by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Frank Lestringant and Denis Crouzet, Corbin surveys representations of ‘bestial violence’ from the Wars of Religion through the Revolutionary Wars and demonstrates how ‘the everyday violence of another era’ – the cannibalism of Saint Bartholomew’s ...”

“... why should there be, or what would there be? Hamilton talks about it in his pained and nobly frank Preface to Fifty Poems: ‘Fifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for half a lifetime, you might think. And, in certain moods, I would agree. In certain moods, I used to crave expansiveness and bulk, and early on I had several shots at getting ...”

“... insurance for those of 50 and over’.Excepted from these strictures about Classic FM is Michael Mappin, who keeps the bad jokes to the minimum, isn’t wearingly cheerful and has some specialised knowledge, lightly worn, i.e. he is like an announcer on Radio 3. Most of the others are scarcely past the stage where they snigger at foreign names.17 ...”

“... panels, giving way to grey concrete.Comparisons to other swimming paintings offer themselves up: Michael Andrews’s Melanie and Me Swimming (1978-79), also based on a photograph, or Noah Davis’s paintings of Black swimmers, recently on view at the Barbican. The pink panels of Grove Lane (2000) suggest David Hockney’s flattened pool scenes. It doesn’t ...”

“... close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as I’ve ever come across in the movies. But no one has ever been as repeatedly and consistently sinister, morally ...”

“... comic, and comically easy to impersonate (the Daleks had the same appeal), about a zombie. Like Frank Spencer back in the 1970s, it’s the one impersonation that everyone can convincingly pull off. There’s a pleasure in pretending to be dumb – the Forrest Gump-ification of America done darkly. The parades also allow people to put ugliness on show. In a ...”

“... was in his element. Neither of the two most memorable characters in this book was ‘anybody’: Frank Merlo, the playwright’s lover and adviser, who died of cancer and/or a broken heart, his long devotion cruelly spurned; and the Reverend Dakin Williams, who transcended his Episcopalian background in his nineties, and had a whale of a time camping about ...”

“... in English sexual culture. Clearly, the notion of women – as opposed to men – being completely frank about sex, whether as the basic structural idea of the book, or as its leading theme at this important juncture, would not be erotically interesting unless a greater reticence about sex prevailed, or was expected to prevail, among women in Cleland’s ...”