“... 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 ...”

“... politically correct thought police. Rupert Bear is a racist, offensive character who is poisoning young minds ... Move over Rupert ... there’s more candidates for Nutwood.’ The editors’ first priority is to make all 30 pages of the paper appeal to the punters, but their most important political object is to help the Tories move further to the ...”

“... owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares Pynchon a personal hero. David Foster Wallace moves beyond admiration to adulation – if not, to put it more plainly, outright imitation. It is, in fact, a virtuoso performance that has eclipsed its progenitor: Wallace ...”

“... to his home, sounding out his chances of the job and embellished with an arch little story of young Roy saving up the bus fare from Edmonton to visit, and fall in love with, the museum. It is hard to feel much sympathy for either side in this quarrel (though, if you had to choose, Pope-Hennessy’s case is much the more plausible). There is a genuine ...”

“... 1950s, that might have made him a natural Gaitskellite, but this was a role that chafed for a young MP with a reputation for being too outspoken for his own good. Not for him the plan of prudently joining a faction and loyally working within it – still less of disloyally manoeuvring between factions in an adroitly judged pursuit of preferment. ‘The ...”