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“... is often clunky. Its chief drawback, as Wittgenstein’s remark to Ogden intimates, and as Michael Morris has marvellously put it, is that it is ‘dog-literal’. Moreover, it is insensitive to some philosophically critical features of the German. A well-known example is its failure to heed the distinction that Wittgenstein draws between what is ...”

“... with an appropriately reverberant thunderclap, the long epoch of therapeutic nihilism described by Lewis Thomas in his most recent book.* The insulin story begins, of course, as other medical stories begin, at the bedside – with the taking of a history and an appraisal of the patient’s general health. The history would be loss of weight, debility and ...”

“... of ’62.* Reading them, I immediately wondered about the figure for Glasgow, and I found it in Michael Pacione’s history of the city. There were 97,000 houses in Glasgow awaiting demolition at that time, mostly crumbling tenements, more than half of them without an inside bath and with a loo on the stairs.Just west of Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the ...”

“... at that, now,’ her mother, a perfume magnate whose Protestant husband died nastily for Michael Collins, says of a cup of tea: ‘Strong enough to trot a mouse on.’ He amuses himself, also, by playing up the hero’s drink problem – Marlowe has to be helped into a taxi, passes out in his clothes, throws up – and having him grouse about his ...”

“... form. Opposite views of the problem are taken in two contributions, but with arguments in neither. Michael Daniel and Dmitry Ganenkov review the wealth of cases in the languages of Daghestan; Peter Arkadiev considers languages with just two cases, after which other contributors focus attention on particular languages or language groups, including Ik (Christa ...”

“... use to reel in audiences a century later.In his introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition, Michael Tondre calls this ‘a procedural problem that Oil! never resolves, but rather converts into a source of ongoing fictional intrigue. How to more properly hate oil … becomes both an ideological impasse and a literary plot.’ His confidence that the ...”

“... specify who my fellow modèles en gâteaux might be – the late Freddie Trueman I would guess, Michael Parkinson possibly and Alan Titchmarsh (who’s so amiable he might even do it). A candidate for pâtisserie posterity would once have been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 ...”

“... peers of both Modernists and Georgians; and no reader could then have been blamed for thinking Day-Lewis, say, as important as Auden and the same kind of poet. If in 1820 there had been an anthology of the Cockney school, the poetic romances of Keats in it would not have seemed so different from those of Leigh Hunt. Already the pages of Alvarez’s The New ...”

“... assumptions of their times. Sayers adds social and cultural snobbery to a conservative feminism; Michael Innes ties a display of interest in neoclassical art, literature and architecture to one in dreams, nightmare and the grotesque; Margery Allingham’s deep love of a semi-fictional and fast disappearing way of life in rural Suffolk and Essex is ...”

“... of collective passions in the interests of mass slaughter. When one hears philosophers like Michael Walzer or columnists like Anthony Lewis proclaim this as a ‘just war’, one realises once more that words are the first casualty in any ...”

“... a physicist and eminent populariser of science told the producer that whereas a genius such as Michael Faraday would have been awarded three different Nobel Prizes had they then existed, Maxwell would only have won one. No room for him on Auntie’s Olympus. I have no idea which of Maxwell’s achievements might have gained this anachronistic reward: his ...”

“... manufactured mythology even as it built itself on the ruins of the Communist counter-culture. Michael Denning, in his long interpretative history The Cultural Front, has questioned this disdain. His notion of the culture of the Popular Front embraces sturdy proletarian sagas like Mike Gold’s Jews without Money and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath ...”

“... Durrell); butter news editor: Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis: Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (aka Henry Miller); and Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan as the literary editors. As Dearborn notes in a wonderful chapter on life at the Villa Seurat, Miller’s Paris address, ‘most of the editors were ...”

“... As charm is to Cary Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer ...”

“... Paul, called her Doke. Childhood friends called her Dodo or Didi or Priscilla Preoccupied. Michael Curtiz called her Miss Lachrymose (she could weep on cue). Jack Carson called her Zelda. Fans called her Miss Huckleberry Finn. Film crews called her Nora Neat and Dorothy Detail. A staff assistant called her Janie O. Gene Kelly called her Brunhilda. Bob ...”