“... critic should notice that these are distinctive, that most of Milton is not like this at all. Michael Watkins in an unpublished thesis observes that Fish makes Milton sound exactly like George Herbert, and of course he is nothing like George Herbert. Herbert’s central theology is thoroughly Calvinist; he accepts the depravity of man. Milton famously ...”

“... and became a regular editor on the paper. Then, with Ionescu’s help, he got a Government grant to pursue his law studies in Paris. By the time he returned, in 1931, Romanian politics had become more contentious. Previously, it had mostly been about gaining access to the public trough, but now a postwar generation, puerile, violent, romantic, shifted ...”

“... O Lord, perceive and hear My heart, my hope, my plaint, my overthrow, My will to rise, and let by grant appear That to my voice thine ears do well intend. (130) For concision and straightforward speech, Arthur Golding – whose translation of Ovid was loved by Pound and plagiarised by Shakespeare – in 1571: My heart is boiling of a good word. The work ...”

“... depended on outside power. For a time, such power was forthcoming. In the early 1870s, President Grant sent troops to South Carolina and federal marshals to Alabama to protect former slaves. The willingness to intervene with force soon waned, however, and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction followed, a process whites called Redemption, or the restoration ...”

“... judge who had bent the law on Richard’s orders; Alexander Neville, the archbishop of York; Michael de la Pole, the chancellor; and de Vere, whom Richard had recently named marquess of Dublin and duke of Ireland. All five, along with a widening circle of associates, were convicted of treason by Parliament. Brembre, the only one who dared to appear in ...”

“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

“... She hadn’t been sure whether she should let Geoffrey Keynes buy a portrait of her by Duncan Grant: ‘We don’t copulate without marriage,’ he wrote, ‘but we do meet in cafés, talk on buses, go on unchaperoned walks, stay with each other, give each other books, without marriage. Can’t we even have each other’s pictures?’ But the practice of ...”

“... of his ‘Who ...’?) But the difficulty with the radical’s ‘Who whom?’ is that it invites Michael Frayn’s reasonable regression: Who asks ‘Who whom?’?The blurb to the wonderful vast new Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk-Greenbaum-Leech-Svartvik) says truly of its quadrumvirate that they are ‘acknowledged to be leading ...”

“... conditions of its production.’ In support of this claim, Norris paraphrases an argument of Michael Ryan from his Marxism and Deconstruction, makes numerous, if cryptic allusions to the writings of Derrida, and relies on his interpretation of the ‘hard’ deconstruction of Paul de Man. This reliance makes for very heavy going. His discussion of de Man ...”

“... The ‘raft of laws’ of which he now disapproves seems to have emanated exclusively from Michael Howard, when the Government was already on its last legs. Alexander’s book is a compelling account of what the powerful in our society now mean by democracy; his is the authentic voice of post-democratic liberalism and his version of democracy both ...”

“... manager of Watford, a team he had just guided into the Premier League. Boothroyd had been reading Michael Lewis’s 2003 book Moneyball – which revolutionised baseball by showing how spreadsheets and statistical analysis could produce a winning formula – and he told me he had a team of number crunchers slaving away to work the same magic on football. He ...”

“... a soldier who seemed old enough to be in charge. ‘We are not going to hurt anybody,’ Father Michael Dougherty of Lansing, Michigan said. ‘We just want access to this place’ – he pointed north – ‘to Jerusalem.’ From the checkpoint, Jerusalem was a ten-minute drive. A young American marcher urged the soldiers: ‘Come, join us in ...”

“... for robust domestic consumer spending: it didn’t ensure that there were banks ready to grant home or car loans, or rural credit organisations capable of helping farmers modernise. Consumers stuck their money in the bank, or under the mattress, giving China one of the highest rates of household savings in the world. This strategy was part of an ...”

“... world of fandom they opened up. A whole gallery of male heroes was assembled from decades past: Michael Caine, George Best, Keith Moon, Steve McQueen. Some of them I’d barely heard of and some were dead (or very nearly), but I was left in no doubt that a proper lad would be a fan of these geezers. Undoubtedly Loaded – along with ...”

“... studies, many of them prominent supporters of Israel, such as the American Jewish philosopher Michael Walzer, signed a letter stating that ‘annexation of Palestinian territories will cement into place an anti-democratic system of separate and unequal law and systemic discrimination against the Palestinian population. Such discrimination on the basis of ...”