“... A spokesman admits that the cancellation of the Saturday night sleeper from London to Aberdeen ‘until the end of time’ is a bitter blow for those who like to wake up on a Sunday morning to the munching of Highland cattle, but there can be no question of having the train back, say the men at Euston. They can’t find a single soul who’ll agree to work the shift ...”

“... millennia of ebullient trading and a century of, to put it mildly, muddled planning, Sheppard and Michael Hebbert paint their pictures in the same bright colours: of a healthy, wealthy conurbation, unfathomable, inchoate, yet liveable and boundlessly energetic. London confers prosperity on the rest of Britain rather than drains it away, they say. It is ...”

“... privacy (which goes much wider than confidentiality). When the early human rights claim brought by Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones over the intrusion into their wedding reception of a pirate photographer who sold his pictures to Hello! magazine came before the Court of Appeal, I suggested that the common law ...”

“... Deborah Nadoolman Landis, is herself a celebrated Hollywood designer (Raiders of the Lost Ark; Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and now a professor of design history at UCLA; the show consists of some pieces of her own, and many others from Debbie Reynolds’s collection, recently sold – she had pioneered salvaging costumes from studio wardrobes. Landis has ...”

“... The thin sad slates that cover up my home ... If so, we should remember that other poets, like Michael Schmidt, hear in Sisson’s verse ‘a dominant and subtle rhythm that owes its expressive freedom to a close reading of the work of Ezra Pound’. It may seem surprising that so bold a translator should be so angry at the modern versions of the Bible and ...”

“... simple, and astonishingly addictive. Towards the other extreme of sophistication on the BBC was Michael Jakobsen’s Citadel, in which you had to explore a large castle and its environs, picking up keys, unlocking doors, shooting large, malevolent monks between the eyes, taking chickens from the freezer and roasting them in the kitchen, boiling up bones in ...”

“... his own achievement of this, Chandler could have cited the murder of the small-time grifter, Harry Jones, in The Big Sleep, as unforgettable on the page as in Elisha Cook Jr’s performance in the movie. As this example suggests, however, noir content is inseparable from noir form. Noir is menace, despair, darkness, violence and death, the dystopian escape ...”

“... in by ‘a maidservant’ and probably not one person in court, except perhaps Mr. Griffith-Jones QC himself and Mr. Justice Byrne, would have used such a word at any time unless he was writing 18th or 19th-century social history. The story is, in its various forms, famous. But what Griffith-Jones said in his opening ...”

“... on which he’d been elected, and to find a way of blaming it on others. It was decided to send Michael Armacost, an old China hand in both Democratic and Republican Administrations, to conduct the final obsequies. Armacost, indeed, refused to take on the mission ‘unless there was a consensus that the human rights linkage was going to be jettisoned. He ...”

“... Pembroke. The Rival Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is ...”

“... five novels, is experienced as a series of reversals as unexpected as they are humiliating. James Jones, the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the ...”

“... Poe, Browning and many others; those he brought to self-attention, like Swinburne, Morris, Burne-Jones; and everyone from Whistler to Yeats – there were many – whose imaginations were shifted or shaped by his ideas and practice. Though not much now remembered, between approximately 1848 and 1912 Rossetti was, in Whistler’s phrase, ‘a king’. And his ...”

“... In response to a query from Hoover – ‘Isn’t Baldwin a known pervert?’ – an Agent Jones responds: It is not a matter of official record that he is a pervert; however, the theme of homosexuality has figured prominently in two of his three published novels. Baldwin has stated that it is also ‘implicit’ in his first novel Go Tell It on the ...”

“... Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara Castle, Jack Jones of the Transport Workers, Hugh Scanlon of the Engineers and Vic Feather, the recently elected TUC General Secretary. The hours of argument circled round the Government’s need – political as much as economic – for legally enforceable constraints on ...”

“... him).Brando was right, judging by the 2004 movie version of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford. The film itself is a pedestrian and pretty adaptation that can’t quite decide where it stands on the antisemitism of the main characters, but Pacino is an excellent Shylock, emphasising the character’s furious dignity in the face of ...”