“... over; this is just the way things are, straightforward common sense. Dressed in military gear too young for him – helmet, camouflaged parka and pouches stuffed with automatic rifle magazines, gun slung over his shoulder, thumbs tucked into the front plate of his flak jacket as he rocks to and fro in the cold – he discusses the war in the tones of a ...”

“... fascist Christian terrorist and mystic Corneliu Codreanu, founder of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, later known as the Iron Guard, and Marshal Ion Antonescu, dictator during the Second World War, were responsible for the killing. Codreanu, strangled on royal orders in 1938, was the hugely influential prophet of a fanatical creed of blood, soil and ...”

“... this, but the best is probably to begin with its dedication. The book is devoted to the memory of Michael Oakeshott – whose thought, Mount tells us, has left its traces, ‘no doubt sadly smudged’, on many of its pages. At first glance, the affinity between author and authority seems straightforward enough, for Oakeshott was widely held to be the most ...”

“... between the upper and the lower cases. Almost everyone is some sort of nationalist, including even Michael Forsyth, the new Tory Secretary of State for Scotland. In retreat, the Conservatives have discovered that true Unionism awarded Scotland just as much nationalism as was good for it, via Scots Law, institutional autonomy and new devices like the National ...”

“... instalments, but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by Michael Watts, it covered the aftermath of the Pistols’ split at the end of a disastrous American tour; the fitful struggle to make a Sex Pistols movie; McLaren’s dalliance with managing the Slits; the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, holed up with Sid ...”

“... for some of the distinctiveness of The Floor Scrapers, Luncheon and The House Painters, and of Young Man at His Window (1876), with its large and inauspicious foreground of carpet, chair, glass door and chunky balustrade, which ultimately serves to emphasise the relationship between the figure of René Caillebotte – off-centre, seen from behind, his ...”

“... my most spiritual film.’ ‘Elaborate on that.’ ‘No.’) In an early short, The Alphabet, a young girl is hounded by the ABCs – ‘a little nightmare about the fear connected with learning’.But Lynch did have a distinctive approach to language; there were the mantric repeated phrases in each film, the backwards speech of Twin Peaks, and his own way ...”

“... cursed with a chronic liver condition. He died in 1930 at the age of 26. For someone who died so young, his list of achievements is nothing short of amazing. In pure mathematics, he is famous for two theorems about combinations which now form the starting-point for what is known as ‘Ramsey Theory’; in economics, he is acknowledged as providing the ...”

“... peasant who, having stumbled on political power, is unsure how to wield it. Reporting on Michael Portillo’s visit as defence minister to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1996, Anne Applebaum (coincidentally, for the Evening Standard) has a good old chuckle: Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her Majesty’s aircraft just behind ...”

“... Perhaps the real test of an anthology is whether it convincingly brings fresh material forward. Michael Harper, Dave Smith, Albert Goldbarth: Vendler takes risks at the Contemporary end of her Book, and mostly carries them off. Though one looks in vain for Hass or Dulpen, there is much to please, including a clutch of decorously unfeminist women. Louise ...”

“... may be yet. The closest parallels to Aids in epidemiological terms are syphilis and Hepatitis B. Michael Adler, in Aids and the Epidemics of History, lists the sudden appearance of syphilis (at the end of the 15th century), its asymptomatic carrier state and predominantly sexual means of transmission as the chief points of similarity. Hepatitis B, as Baruch ...”

“... from Covid-19 are older people, the lockdown is an intolerable encroachment on the liberty of the young. A more serious argument might ask where the limits of acceptable risk lie, or might consider – in a pandemic future – whether mass medical surveillance by the state, from automated temperature readings to contagion tracing by phone tracking, is worth ...”

“... in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the Italia Prize in 1949, until 1955, of 15 entries chosen as the ...”

“... as it runs the risk of exposing the criminality of the state. ‘Criminalisation by the state,’ Michael Grewcock writes, with reference to equally dire migrant policies in Australia, ‘is integral to legitimising criminal activity by the state.’ The political philosopher Howard Caygill goes so far as to argue that violence at the borders of the modern ...”

“... that I know many felt at being involved in futile wars, badly run and heartbreakingly wasteful in young lives and treasure’. Another officer, still serving, recalled the ‘cognitive dissonance in London’ at the time of the Iraq denouement in 2008: ‘The refusal on the part of senior officers and officials even to admit that we had been found wanting and ...”