“... says, In an illuminating page or two of self-analysis (it’s supposed to be about someone called Michael, but his brother is so sure it’s about himself that he changes that name to Patrick): ‘Sometimes he deliberately set out to hate people, and though hating by all the rules of warfare seemed the proper thing to do, it was always a failure with ...”

“... such as Prescott, Blunkett and Hain merged into the Blairite mass or, like Margaret Beckett, Michael Meacher and Kinnock himself, became bit players on the political stage, Cook remained a prominent and prickly reminder of the electoral calculations that had won Blair the leadership in 1994. In this respect, he was undoubtedly helped by being banished to ...”

“... Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up ...”

“... In 1864, he won a Snell Exhibition, which had sent many brilliant students – not least Adam Smith – from Glasgow University to Balliol College, Oxford. The high churchmanship of Oxford often unsettled the Presbyterian certainties of the Balliol Scotch; Archibald Campbell Tait, an exhibitioner of a previous generation, even ended up as the archbishop ...”

“... about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels ...”

“... Maxwell discusses the implications of his embryonic electrodynamic theory. He writes excitedly to Michael Faraday about his discovery that, according to his own theory, electric and magnetic fields would propagate with a speed that appeared to be identical with the speed of light – from which he concludes, as he states in a subsequent letter to ...”

“... taught or read; but there is still no written UK constitution. A constitutive story, argues Rogers Smith, another American political scientist, is a narrative that recounts the key historical events that formed a community and describes the ‘priceless’ character traits that community members have evolved as a result. When a state ceases to be able to ...”

“... the intriguing sequence of prints he and others made of paintings of the Peak District by Thomas Smith of Derby, so unlike anything else in the history of landscape art that I have to slap my wrist to stop myself reaching for the word ‘surreal’. It was chiefly through the engravings of these and other printmakers that European landscapes were known to ...”

“... arresting Rodney King, a black man, Unsworth won half the Booker Prize – the other half went to Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient – for a novel that in its unsparing portrayal of life aboard an 18th-century slave ship looked back to the colonial and commercial origins of racial tensions in North America. With its description of a multicultural ...”

“... at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Ginsberg read the first section of Howl; two younger poets, Michael McClure (early twenties) and Gary Snyder (mid-twenties), read on the same night. So did Lew Welch, who disappeared years later in the Sierra Nevada. Barry Miles, who has written the introductory essay in the catalogue for the Centre Pompidou’s ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”

“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”

“... mining profits and the miners’ cost of living rose). She sees FDR’s veto of the anti-labour Smith-Connolly Act as courageous, he as ‘halfhearted’. She praises Walter Reuther’s plans for re-ordering production; he sees a labour movement increasingly dependent on the state. He regrets the defeat of militant shop-floor industrial democracy ‘shaped ...”

“... he is ‘a Paul Klee in prose as delicate, as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humoured, sweet Beckett.’ Christopher Middleton writes: ‘Well before the 1920s, the text for Walser is a non-thing, as much so as a Cubist guitar or Magritte’s apple (“Ceci n’est pas une pomme”).’* Other comparisons include ...”

“... R.: ‘Yeah. Difficult, northern and a cunt.’ 2 September. I am reading the second volume of Michael Palin’s diaries, which regularly feature the film producer Denis O’Brien. He produced A Private Function, which was made on a shoestring, the funds promised for the film regularly siphoned off for a more favoured O’Brien production, Water, which was ...”