“... the end of La Grande Illusion, when the two French soldiers, dressed in black, are trudging up a snow-covered mountain, their awkward movements apparently choreographed in a kind of counterpoint? Or is it in the spaces he leaves for us to fill in, what Truffaut calls ‘un travail semi-improvisé, volontairement in-achevé, “ouvert”, en sorte que chaque ...”

“... Eavan Boland writes, ‘the attack of his syntax, his brat-pack stance as poète maudit.’ Michael Longley ‘felt overwhelmed and wanted to withdraw to a safe distance’. It was obvious that, as a young poet, he dominated the university scene. It was not so obvious that the university would dominate him. Of the Northern Irish poets who emerged in the ...”

“... group. Everyone laughs at naive Janice, who says in her hokey country accent: ‘I love me some Michael Jackson.’ Even lower down the social scale is Daphne, the poor child of a cleaning woman. She hardly ever speaks, but once wrote a prize-winning poem containing the lines: ‘You are my father, the veteran/When you cry in the dark/It rains and rains and ...”

“... numbers, the ravens may be a worse danger still. The birds have become what the wildlife biologist Michael Soule calls a ‘subsidised species’, meaning that they have a stable food source in garbage, as house-cats preying on songbirds do in cat food. Urban garbage dumps around the edges of the deep desert have encouraged a population explosion among ...”

“... Paul Sheldon, crashes in a desolate area of the Rockies. It is winter, his car is buried in the snow, and his broken body is rescued by an eccentric recluse. She turns out to be a homicidal and crazy nurse, Annie Wilkes, who before retiring under something of a professional cloud killed 20 of her patients. But she is a devoted – not to say fanatical ...”

“... lives in the shell itself. This is what the Disney Corporation Inc. had done to all the legends: Snow White, Pinocchio, even Huckleberry Finn.’ So much for the Magic Kingdom. In Australia, the heroine encounters the opposition of entrenched conservatism, which she combats in a healthy spirit of give and take. On her return, the deluge has fallen on ...”

“... and ‘green growth’ pushed by – among others – the former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and his cast of visiting Dutch architects, questioning post-Hurricane Sandy projects like the Big U seawall proposed for lower Manhattan: it would attract tourists and protect Wall Street, but displace storm surge waters to surrounding, poorer ...”

“... dead, Your wife, your child? Ros Schwartz is quoting here from a selection of Sachs in English by Michael Hamburger and others, whereas when it comes to rendering from Vietnamese, she offers the original transliterated, and then, working closely with Gansel, translates from her French versions, thereby forging a powerful echo chamber (even two steps removed ...”

“... them hysterical letters in the 1840s, trying to radicalise them about the Irish famine. This time, Michael Collins visits Kilneagh, as a friend. The Troubles come. The house is burnt and Willie Quinton’s father is killed with his dogs and servants, not by Irishmen resenting his English connections, but by Black and Tans avenging the hanging of an informer ...”

“... bones might be deep in Forest Lawn, but the audience expects and will pay for his presence. Michael Jackson Live? It’s a no-brainer, securing the singer a kind of higher existence – a freedom from quibbling reality – that the real Jackson tried to have all his life but could only dream of in a terrifying series of Neverlands.Dead 2Pac appeared at ...”

“... in the form of a script. Warner’s magic realism is not that of Marquez and Rushdie but of Michael Ondaatje, whose magical images do not require any supernatural explanation. Morvern’s knee sparkles with different-coloured specks because she once slid on her knees and grazed her skin across the glitter of a Christmas card. Lanna’s grandmother ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... optimism -‘cheerfulness in the bunker’ – before polling day in the 1874 General Election. ‘Michael Foot might have said it during the 1983 campaign’ is a cheeky aside, given that Jenkins evidently expects his readers to remember who was in which bunker at the relevant moment. There is more to Gladstone, however, than politics. His restless energy ...”

“... fiction. The originator of the genre is a work better than either Faber’s or Waters’s novel: Michael Sadleir’s Fanny by Gaslight. Published in 1940, this went through five impressions in as many months (despite Ministry of Supply paper restrictions) and was filmed as a lush Gainsborough melodrama in 1944, launching the careers of James Mason (the ...”

“... poor old Land League were presented as non-constitutional headaches for O’Connell and Parnell. Michael Collins was a Treaty negotiator rather than a warlord. Outside in the world there were car bombs and hunger strikes, done in the name of our nation, in the name of history. Inside we were cleansing history, concentrating on those aspects of our past which ...”