“... is the new sound – the song is the first on Highway 61 Revisited – of Dylan’s expanded band: Michael Bloomfield’s taut guitar-playing, the easy-going piano, the optimistic warble of the Hammond organ. But Ricks doesn’t write about any of that: instead, he writes about Larkin (‘Home is so sad’). This comes as less of a shock than perhaps it ...”

“... wonderment and awe that precipates his final submission. (‘How fine my master is! … I’ll be wise hereafter/And seek for grace.’) The result, Schalkwyk suggests, is that ‘the player has it both ways,’ so that the play can trade ‘on the continuing significance of costume as political reality’ even as the action exposes its theatrical ...”

“... Both are defeated over the course of the play, and its happy ending celebrates Cymbeline’s wise decision that Britain should remain part of the Roman Empire.Shakespeare doesn’t go out of his way to make the English national character sound very appealing either. The gravedigger in Hamlet suggests that if the distracted Danish prince doesn’t recover ...”

“... overcome the greater, whether to shed innocent blood as the price of breaking humanity’s chains. Michael Scammell has devoted more than 20 years of his own life to producing this tremendous, absorbing biography, hoping to restore Koestler and his work to new generations. It was a bold thing to take on. In the first place, Koestler wrote two books – Arrow ...”

“... to some strategic nationalisation. As well as sounding eerily like Labour, there are shades of Michael Heseltine, a reminder that Johnson once described his own politics as ‘a Brexity Hezza’. And we shouldn’t imagine that Houchen lifts phrases only from the Labour right. In a recent piece for the website Conservative Home, he envisions the ...”

“... Projects Committee, which had nominal powers to dispense tiny sums to popular forms of art. Michael Astor and I spent much time examining claims on these funds, mostly on behalf of projects the Chairman knew a priori to be rubbish. He was never to be found, as we were, along with Coldstream and Hugh Willatt, the Secretary-General, penetrating the ...”

“... one, & blister another, & be very useful, tho’ I believe disagreeable to all’. ‘Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind’ describes the best clinical care that most people could hope for, particularly at a time when traditional lore, empirical practice and scientific theory co-existed and intermingled. Wiltshire rightly devotes close attention to the poem ...”

“... space it buys While everyone who’s got a job forgets Roy Jenkins once was roughly twice as wise A Chancellor as is Sir Geoffrey Howe – A fact she’d rather like suppressed just now. The Peace of Bishop Stortford and Howe’s Budget – In each case the effect might not be meant, But if it’s by the outcome that you judge it You must ascribe it ...”

“... as if his first experiences were definitive and could only be lost if pestered by later matters. Michael MacLaverty, a gifted and largely forgotten writer, nearly broke my heart with a beautiful book, Lost Fields, one of the first books that I recall caring for. But again, he stayed where he started: perhaps the experience of childhood and boyhood was too ...”

“... 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 17 – was given leading roles, but ...”

“... control of the conventions he uses than St Paul, and the single essay on the Pauline Epistles, by Michael Goulder, does full justice to the Apostle’s originality, and his ability to outsmart his opponents by mobilising the rhetorical devices of his day. With the Gospels, the interplay of individual literary skill and the dictates of literary convention are ...”

“... macro world of the individual in daily life. But it’s so attractive to feel in the know brain-wise. Questioned about his theories, Guntern explains to me that, yes, it is true that brain research is in a very uncertain infancy, but we must use whatever tools we can in order to intervene in the disastrous conduct of modern life and to save companies which ...”

“... the Law of the World, for you and for all men; to be servants, the more foolish of us to the more wise. The difficulty with Carlyle’s racism is that it cannot be smoothed away as being merely to do with the Zeitgeist. ‘Servantship’ and ‘Hierarchy’ – the eternal subordination of the brawny masses to the brainy minority – are fundamental to his ...”

“... born in the 17th century, probably did not mean she thought Johnson ‘reasonable; judicious; wise’ (this definition of sensible is censured as an example of ‘low conversation’ in his Dictionary of the English Language). The thing most likely to have struck her was how easily and strongly his feelings were affected. ‘It was a love-match on both ...”

“... looking for juicy yarns. This is why a racy, readable, gossipy book like The World’s Money by Michael Moffitt (himself an adviser to Shearson American Express, a subsidiary of one of the big lenders) is worth a whole stack of official reports, particularly to policy-makers, who have to deal constantly with markets but often have no idea of what they ...”