“... owing to his lack of assiduity in his attendance beneath the portrait of Queen Anne’ into ‘Michael Howard didn’t think Norman Stone did enough lecturing’? Nearly every page would have profited from half a dozen footnotes. As it is we’re confronted with sentences such as ‘I have since moved to Vespasiennes & to Gwyn Williams (but am not ...”

“... of 1980 and 1984, in both of which Ronald Reagan’s surrogate opponent was David Stockman, a young former radical who went on to head the Office of Management and Budget before resigning over the budget deficit in Reagan’s second term. Stockman had been employed by the independent candidate John Anderson, and played Anderson (with whom he had grown ...”

“... modern radical Islam, such as Syed Qutb and Abdullah Azzam. Through his teacher, Didar met other young men with similar ideas. One, Hisham, became a good friend. Soon they were talking about the new party they would form that would be part of al-Qaida. In November 2001, Didar was told by his teacher that a group of militants had announced a jihad in ...”

“... to tell the difference between them. Clark’s quip (although it wasn’t really his) about how Michael Heseltine had to buy his own furniture was widely cited as the nadir of bona fide toffdom. But was Alan Clark himself a toff? His family millions had been amassed by his great-grandfather, a Paisley textiles merchant. Newish money, then, but older ...”

“... Many Hollywood stars, for example, attend AA, but you won’t find yourself sitting next to Michael Douglas unless you happen to be in the industry and making seven-figure alimony payments. There is no copyright on the 12-step formula and any number of look-alike therapies have borrowed it: Al-Anon, Al-Ateen, Chocanon, MA (Marijuana Anonymous), Weight ...”

“... Ponting first came to notice as a fearless whistleblower in the Ministry of Defence who exposed Michael Heseltine’s dodgy behaviour during the inquiry into the sinking of the Belgrano. As a historian he has made effective use of this reputation as the man they dare not gag. His writings tend to present themselves as ‘revisionist’ (his book on ...”

“... man has no ready buttress for his self-regard. That historian is fictional: he is the narrator of Michael Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. But the only thing significantly off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them. Mount’s Uppers do, broadly ...”

“... offices of great causes. Among them was the Africa Bureau, led with arctic integrity by the Rev. Michael Scott, with Mary Benson – just as dedicated but warm and welcoming – by his side. Close by was the Aborigines’ Protection Society, run by Tommy Fox Pitt. A dignified, slightly military gentleman, Tommy had been a district officer on the Copperbelt ...”

“... wartime and domestic diaries, his infantile contributions to school magazines (‘Awake! oh you young men of England/For if, when your country’s in need,/You do not enlist by the thousand/You truly are cowards indeed’ – this written c.1914). For the first time, we get the complete texts of such marginalia. These early items are signed ‘Eric ...”

“... teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. Süskind’s nasal rhapsody was an unexpected but quite logical best-seller ...”

“... inhabits a milieu, or space, in which the standards of plain speaking were set by the redoubtable Michael Davie, who really should get back there and sort out his errant protégés as soon as possible. Good journalists should not waste time producing bad PhD theses. In the academic context there is some reason for the success of pseudo-scientific ...”

“... of the painting, the eye can wander about as it pleases. In a recent book on Mughal painting, Michael Rogers observed that ‘in many fine Islamic paintings, as indeed in the late Gothic manuscript painting of Northern Europe, it is left to the viewer to organise the space as he or she will, the eye roving from exquisite detail to exquisite detail without ...”

“... to buy it was to hand. ‘Wage and income restrictions, price increases and unemployment among young people and women sent average household incomes plummeting to levels of twenty years before.’ After 1984 inflation rose by 50 per cent a year, and very soon by much more. The outlook had become unrelievedly desperate and everyone knew it: except, it ...”

“... In a gloss on the snot riddle in his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Michael Thompson explains that the riddle succeeds by playing upon that which is residual to our system of cultural categories. When, in the context of wealth and poverty, we talk of possessable objects we unquestioningly assume that we are talking about ...”

“... that had successfully salvaged a wilderness from corporate and governmental assaults. Through Michael van Walt van der Praag, a Dutch lawyer long active in the Tibetan cause, he made contact with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation. This gave him access to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which he addressed in ...”