“... humanly and ecologically, petroleum extraction is. In an essay for TomDispatch.com posted in May, Michael Klare reminded us that the Deepwater Horizon blowout is an augury of the age of extreme extraction to come: ‘While poor oversight and faulty equipment may have played a critical role in BP’s catastrophe in the Gulf, the ultimate source of the disaster ...”

“... he said! ‘W.B. Yeats.’ And added: ‘I’m a poet.’ If he had said his name was Michael and declared himself to be an archangel it could not have had a more catastrophic effect upon me. ‘What?’ I exclaimed, ‘Yeats! The Irish poet! My God – well, my God … well … Yeats … well …’ Then I suddenly heard the ghastly sound of my ...”

“... leaders’ aims. It would have shrugged off the emigration of a few hundred thousand disaffected young people, and the deaths and maiming of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Russians, as the necessary price of success. It would have brutally and successfully shown its power to crush what little internal opposition remains. It would have exposed the ...”

“... and ‘the’, rises to cosmic grandeur. This move towards involving the planets in the young Boland’s encounter with the old woman is nicely ironised by the way in which the poet’s belated rejection of harmonious servitude to English court culture is written in lines which themselves strike an elegantly Elizabethan note: but nothing now can ...”

“... on national assistance.’ Among those Protestants to whom O’Neill failed to get through was the young Ian Paisley, then making a name for himself as an anti-Catholic rabble-rouser. Paisley, a personal friend of District Inspector Nixon, began by denouncing O’Neill as a sell-out and a Lundy. To many, Paisley was a figure of ridicule, but as the political ...”

“... the Soviet Union as a foreigner and not become obsessed with spying. (If anyone doubts this, read Michael Frayn’s wonderful novel The Russian Interpreter, published the year I first went to Moscow.) ‘Do you think X is a spy?’ we were always asking each other about new Russian acquaintances, and sometimes about each other. It was a question that went the ...”

“... thinker Stuart Hall, who would later become known as one of the founders of cultural studies. The Young Turks had only affection and respect for Hall, but relations with Thompson were often difficult and eventually he left. He was a brilliant man, but English to the bone, and in some ways a Little Englander with a traditionalist hostility to the intellectual ...”

“... reading in Picture Post (and probably at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While ...”

“... the Host into the body of Christ cracked like an egg. In his book Goodbye! Good Men, author Michael Rose writes that the liberalised rules set up a takeover of seminaries by homosexuals.   Vatican II liberalised rules but left the most outdated one: celibacy. That vow was put in place originally because the Church did not want heirs making claims on ...”

“... out together, producing the webzine Spiked, setting up media training for teens (Debating Matters, Young Journalists’ Academy, a ‘programme for London state-school pupils who have the passion and the guts, but not “the right contacts”’) and a confusing cloud of other organisations: the Manifesto Club, WorldWrite, Audacity.org, the Modern ...”

“... and its struggle for independence’. The theatre was packed every night. The message was clear: young men would have to give up everything for Ireland. George Bernard Shaw later said that it was a play ‘which might lead a man to do something foolish’. Lennox Robinson wrote that it ‘made more rebels in Ireland than a thousand political speeches or a ...”

“... have really attempted to throw light on them by relating them to the question of why she wrote. Michael Rosenthal’s book makes a very inadequate attempt to examine these issues. He has a thesis, though it is not entirely clear just what it is. In one version of it he states that ‘as an artist Woolf was obsessed with what we can call formal rather than ...”

“... National Museum and the Natural History Museum), his diaries remain in England. They were seen by Michael Collins and Eamon Duggan during the 1921 Treaty negotiations. In the early Thirties Duggan wrote: Michael Collins and I saw the Casement Diary by arrangement with Lord Birkenhead. We read it. I did not know ...”

“... Back when the Independent was young and thriving, the paper used to sponsor lunchtime ‘theatre conferences’ at the Edinburgh Festival in association with the Traverse. The description ‘theatre conferences’ makes these public discussions sound starchier than they were. I was happy to do my bit chairing events in exchange for the train fare and somewhere to sleep ...”

“... in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions’. He quotes the brain scientist Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of neuroplasticity and the man behind the monkey experiments in the 1960s, to the effect that the brain can be ‘massively remodelled’ by exposure to the internet and online tools like Google. ‘THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL ...”