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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it possible for MPs to become ministers. This sounds like a minor wrinkle, but as the essays by Michael Gordon and by Rose Melikan show, it had a significant effect on our constitutional principles. An emerging principle of ministerial exclusion was turned on its head and eventually became our notion of ministerial responsibility. Instead of the legislature ...”

“... has been forthcoming from the press. Another painful development was the publication in June of Michael Leapman’s Last Days of the Beeb: a narrative of power plays and mean-spirited intrigues. Here was a writer about the BBC for whom the programmes and their producers did not seem to matter all that much. What mattered was behind the screen, and at the ...”

“... Muggeridge, and the French sandwich of Arletty and Yvonne Arnaud contains Anthony Armstrong-Jones. The name of Neville Chamberlain seems to set off a nervous chain-reaction of theatricality, for he is noisily succeeded by Gower Champion, Coco Chanel, Carol Channing, ‘Chips’ Channon (by no means out of place), and Charlie Chaplin. All the Coopers are ...”

“... Early​ in the afternoon of 6 May 2010, the leading stock market index in the US, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, suddenly started falling. There was no evident external reason for the fall – no piece of news or economic data – but the market, which had been drifting slowly downwards that day, in a matter of minutes dropped by 6 per cent ...”