“... than Harold Bloom? Well, if you take her word for it, it’s Camille Paglia, come to set the world straight on the burning issues of our time: tenured radicals, date rape, the aesthetic evolution of Madonna. The self-styled genius and warrior woman seized public attention with her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson ...”

“... of Arabic,’ Ahmad says to the owner, grinning conspiratorially at us. ‘Speak Arabic with Pak Michael, go on! He speaks Arabic. Go on! With a beard like that in Yemen you’d perfume it; here you mothball it to get rid of the cockroaches!’ So much for the sacred beard, a sign of piety with the Prophet’s beard the exemplar. It is distinctively Arab ...”

“... of a family name such as Bellegueule is a challenge to even the most skilful translator. Michael Lucey opts for ‘Prettymug’, which is as close as English gets: a man with ‘une belle gueule’ tends to be rugged and macho, while one with ‘un beau visage’ is handsome in a more standard fashion. When combined with Eddy (very much not ...”

“... indifferent as an artist to its human consequences. This frigidity is elaborated in works of straight SF like The Drowned World and The Terminal Beach, in Post-Modernist ‘condensed’ novels like those collected in The Atrocity Exhibition, and in New Wave ‘speculative fiction’, such as Crash (Ballard’s previous best work, in my view). For Empire ...”

“... and parterres and side-boxes, the cost of nails and packthread, the greenroom gossip? I concede straight away that if you are mounting a performance, as they say, ‘in period’, then you need the basic historical dimensions and data, just as when you are playing ‘authentic’ baroque music you have to tune your strings to the right pitch. And if you are ...”

“... worldly-wise readers, ‘getting your way can require a degree of intrigue and manoeuvring.’ The straight-dealing Tony Blair would, they say, prefer that this was unnecessary and does not really ‘enjoy the modus operandi’. How very fortunate the Labour leader is, then, to be able to count on the services of one whose name has become a byword for ...”

“... died, and a fifth is missing. At the start, her daughter has received what may well be the missing Michael’s clothes, washed up from the sea ‘in the far north’ at Donegal. During the course of the play, Maurya tries to persuade her remaining son, Bartley, not to ride off with the horses to the Galway fair, predicting that he, too, will be taken by the ...”

“... inside a Department – as in the case of what came to me from Clive Ponting. A careful look at Michael Heseltine’s lengthy broadcast evidence shows what exactly was taking place in the Whitehall stratosphere during the month in which Hilda Murrell was murdered. On 6 March Denzil Davies wrote to the Prime Minister, about discrepancies in Mrs Thatcher’s ...”

“... necessary to understand That a poet may not exist, that his writings Are the incomplete circle and straight drop Of a question mark ... In the 18th century Paley deduced the reality of God from a watch: Malley, who, Ethel reports approvingly, ‘made a fair amount of money repairing watches’, is his dark modern opposite, uncertain even of his own ...”

“... According to one early theory, the reason some of the murder sites were close to branches of Michael’s, the craft-store chain, was that the shooter wished to be thought of as the Archangel Michael, expecting the cowed populace to recall the name’s meaning (‘who is like God’) and to realise the end was nigh. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... coastal range. Between sleeping and dreaming, the men talk intermittently until dawn. One of them, Michael Adair, is an officer in the penal colony’s regimental corps, and has just spent 48 hours in the saddle, riding up from the coast at the express orders of the Governor of New South Wales in order to oversee the hanging of the other man at dawn. The ...”

“... her marriage, or for many years after it, has survived. She would have been far from pleased with Michael Millgate’s speculations on their disappearance. ‘In her later years she was often regarded as a faintly ludicrous figure, and in her earlier years her status as Miss Emma Gifford or even as Mrs Thomas Hardy might well have been insufficient to ensure ...”

“... sit upon each other gracelessly, heavy with dull and often clumsily conveyed management detail. Michael Swann is a ‘man with a highly distinguished scientific background, a very sharp brain and clouds of pipe smoke’. Douglas Muggeridge goes off with Milne to the West Indies two pages after he has died ‘tragically’ of a brain tumour. Strange that a ...”

“... three years of intensive negotiations, has slipped from the collective memory. This is odd. As Michael Cotey Morgan points out in his fascinating new book, it was a conference with grand objectives, most notably a final settlement of the Second World War, just as Vienna had forged a settlement after the Napoleonic Wars and Paris had tried to come to terms ...”