“... here nor there. For the last couple of years the Royal Society of Literature under its chairman Michael Holroyd has been lobbying the Heritage Lottery Fund to release money for the acquisition of the papers of living British authors. On 9 April, Ferdinand Mount used his pulpit in the TLS to add reasoned support for a long-term policy of preserving the ...”

“... to thank him, and added a handwritten note in blue ink: ‘I was really impressed and have told Michael Gove about your work. Keep it up!’ Less than two years later, police went to the school and arrested Raza. On 6 March this year, he was charged with nine counts of fraud in relation to the school’s finances: three offences of fraud by abuse of ...”

“... alcohol and morphine. But the persona he created still drives sales sixty years after his death. Michael Hofmann’s 2009 translation of his last novel, Alone in Berlin, sold around 350,000 copies in the UK alone, 100,000 of them in the first three months after publication. Much of Alone in Berlin’s success has to do with the way the story is told. Otto ...”

“... Keneally anatomises historical Australia by plucking from its origins a strange factual nugget. Michael Ondaatje does something similar for Canada with a wispy succession of word paintings eerily evocative of a past he cannot have known but can magically conjure. His prose is consciously poetic and at first sight seems more conditioned by the need to ...”

“... aforesaid Nicholas is charged, before us at Westminster on Saturday next after eight days of Saint Michael, to undergo and receive whatever our court should then and there happen to order concerning him in this behalf, and this in no wise omit, upon the peril that may befall, and have there this writ. Witness, Sir John Popham, at Westminster, the eleventh day ...”

“... several school buses. Just two years before the Boston busing crisis, the right-wing pundit Michael Novak, a staunch defender of working-class whites, expressed his disbelief that they could even be accused of anti-black prejudice: ‘Racists? Our ancestors owned no slaves. Most of us ceased being serfs only in the last two hundred years.’ ‘White ...”

“... those who are forced to emigrate in this country’ (the face of the party’s finance spokesman, Michael Noonan, twitched involuntarily as he struggled to contain himself while standing alongside his leader). Appearing on RTE as the scale of Fine Gael’s victory became clear, he referred to government as ‘the Big G’ and told viewers that ‘Paddy likes ...”

“... 20 grand a year seems to be the favoured target. Beryl Bainbridge owns up to making £35,000 and Michael Holroyd regards £70,000 as a decent haul. Will Self can manage on anything between £40,000 and £80,000. At the bottom end of the scale there are poets who would happily settle for a regular 12 grand. Writers with film and mass-media connections ...”

“... of their opacity. The respect under examination in Sennett’s new book requires the same ‘grant of autonomy to others’ that in his earlier books is central to the possibility of social bonds among strangers, and crucial to undermining ‘the obsession with persons at the expense of more impersonal social relations’. But understanding the close ...”

“... unaided, Hickey first invokes the work of Chardin and Fragonard and then manages to bring in Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, which he uses to explicate the meaning of the painting’s four looks; five if you include our own nostalgic look at what has now become ‘our gardenia’, a look which ...”

“... and thereby stem the growing radicalisation of the base, the regime would certainly be prepared to grant enormously increased influence to the Church. In effect, this is the last ideological trick available to the regime, which could thus cover the process of normalisation by a drastic modification of its ideology. The signs of a rift between the Church and ...”

“... Citizen. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, on receiving the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, Rankine acknowledged as much: ‘To me, the getting of this honour is … the culture saying: “We have an investment in dismantling white dominance in our culture. If you’re trying to do that, we’re going to help you” … The MacArthur is given to ...”

“... for whom time was presumably lots of money, debated drugs and censorship for over an hour (the grant involved was about £30). On the IT matter White, who perhaps shouldn’t have got into the position of having to do so, opposed his chairman; and the Chairman, it emerges, couldn’t stand him anyway. However, the invective against White fades into a ...”

“... forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes. Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea is Niall Ferguson. Only an American empire, he insists, can secure order in a dangerous, unruly world. He does not ...”

“... but Ashton’s young male lovers. Among the most influential of these dancer-lovers was Michael Somes, who, with Alexander Grant and Brian Shaw, remained loyal throughout hit career. Somes was a charismatic leading man, and partner to Fonteyn. There were inevitable jealousies within the company when Somes – at ...”