“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in a live-in studio on the grounds of the AFI, with only six or seven main cast and crew and a grant of $10,000, supplemented by Lynch’s job delivering the Wall Street Journal. Jack Nance, who would become his friend and long-term collaborator, was cast as Henry. Lynchian figures move at strange speeds, and Nance has the waddling gait of Chaplin’s ...”

“... unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big enough: in ...”

“... persuaded the makers of MANSPEC, a psychometric assessment system for management consultants, to grant him a licence to their software. The program came on a stack of floppy discs. Sale’s sample would be the army’s brigadiers, a rank then reached after around 25 years of service, and only by the most successful candidates.In 1990 there were 49 brigadiers ...”

“... immunity’. On 15 March, under growing pressure as other European states banned mass gatherings, Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, decried ‘populist’ measures that ‘don’t have the right impact’, contrasting Italian and British policy, and claiming that Britain was the only country ‘following the science’.Matt Hancock, the health ...”

“... the potential of AI, is only four years old; the brainchild of the (now) 25-year-old MIT graduate Michael Truell, it was valued at $29 billion last November. This month, it announced that the next version, Cursor 3, would not have an edit window at the centre of its user interface. It would no longer be a tool to help programmers write software, but one they ...”

“... point that Desmond brings out so well – drawing on the work of Martin Rudwick, Peter Bowler and Michael Bartholomew – is that Darwin’s Origin of Species actually caught Huxley on the wrong foot. If the future of scientific naturalism was, after all, to be bound up with an evolutionary theory, there was a respect in which Huxley had backed the wrong ...”

“... some but not all of this. The solo wrecking procedure remains. So does paid sponsorship of MPs. As Michael Rush recounts in his chapter on the law relating to members’ conduct in the Oliver and Drewry volume, Nolan’s first ground for at least temporary non-intervention was that these deals ‘had been made perfectly lawfully’ – the Italian ...”

“... The nation divided always has the BBC on the rack,’ Michael Swann, then chair of the BBC governors, told a meeting of irate Tory backbenchers in 1971. The MPs were unhappy about the BBC’s coverage of Northern Ireland, which, though fastidiously cautious, they deemed insufficiently patriotic. Swann’s line came from a draft, written four years earlier, of a report for the governors eventually published as Broadcasting and the Public Mood and intended to outline the corporation’s approach to the social and political turbulence of the 1960s ...”

“... by the Gaza blockade and by the settlements and checkpoints and the wall on the West Bank. Yet grant the potency of the lobby and the identification – even so, the arrogance with which Israel dictates policy is hard to comprehend on the usual index of motives. Ehud Olmert boasted to a crowd in Ashkelon on 12 January that with one phone call to Bush, he ...”

“... 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 ...”