“... to tell the difference between them. Clark’s quip (although it wasn’t really his) about how Michael Heseltine had to buy his own furniture was widely cited as the nadir of bona fide toffdom. But was Alan Clark himself a toff? His family millions had been amassed by his great-grandfather, a Paisley textiles merchant. Newish money, then, but older ...”

“... belief in the artist as amateur, and the American of a belief in the artist as professional. This wise saw is filled out with modern instances. Davie has lost none of his ability to swoop upon a single fact of singular importance. On Allen Tate’s retreat from the factuality of his poems, such that ‘Shadow and Shade’ is seriously flawed by ‘the ...”

“... however, will still be there, perhaps even with its inborn scepticism reinforced, more worldly-wise for having just been overwhelmed. Australian prose is at its most characteristic when ready-salted. On the whole, Australian journalists have written better history, or at any rate better-written history, than the historians, among whom Geoffrey Blainey ...”

“... the path of the Moon and the shape of the Earth. He never doubted that the world showed God’s wise design – he was impressed, for example, by the fact that only if a centripetal force varied exactly as the inverse square of the distance would bodies act as though their mass was concentrated at their centres or generate stable orbits. This wisdom was ...”

“... and first wife in Vienna, his third wife in Hungary, and close friends (notably Lewis Namier and Michael Karolyi) among émigré intellectuals and political refugees. His later ‘plain man’ affectations notwithstanding, he was multilingual, well-travelled and knowledgeable about European music, architecture and wine. Wrigley brings out those connections ...”

“... from one of the most celebrated books, Atalanta Fugiens, composed in 1617 by the German alchemist Michael Maier. An engraving entitled Nutrix ejus terra est (‘the Earth is its nurse,’ a line from the Emerald Tablet) depicts the Earth as a woman with the globe as her body, nursing a child, while at her feet a she-wolf suckles Romulus and Remus, and baby ...”

“... Mickey at story meetings’; until 1946 Disney also voiced him, in falsetto. In another new Life, Michael Barrier’s The Animated Man, the studio head is seen by animators acting out ‘how a Chinese turtle should dance’, or doing ‘any of the people in the pictures, valets, anything – he all of a sudden was a valet.’ One such episode was burned in ...”

“... Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is ...”

“... of 1774 to the Massachusetts Bay colonists, John Adams repeats the ‘saying of Machiavel no wise man ever contradicted, which has been literally verified in this province, that “while the mass of the people is not corrupted, tumults do no hurt.”’ On the other hand, as the Discourses say, ‘a corrupt people, once it gains its freedom, can only ...”

“... Cyber and television jihad are parts of the war that the former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer believes bin Laden is winning. Scheuer, whose Cassandra-isms as head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit went unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations before 2001, is still trying to warn America. ‘No one,’ he writes, ‘should be surprised ...”

“... In December 1964, Monteith sent a memo to a colleague at Faber: ‘I’m sure it would be wise, wouldn’t it, not to distribute review copies of The Dark too widely or too far in advance to some of the Irish papers … We want to avoid a ban if possible – which is, I fear, probably inevitable.’ In New York, the editor at Macmillan who had ...”

“... hardline view, denied by some (Tolkien), maintained by others (Keats). They were thought to be wise, even prescient, which explains names like Ælf-red, ‘Elf-counsel’. The idea that if you go into Fairyland you must not eat or drink, another common trope, has been borrowed by many modern fantasy writers. For all their tenacity, though, ideas about the ...”

“... to make on its likely architecture, based on finds from these excavations), that proverbially wise ruler’s territories were likely to have been little more impressive than his father’s, and certainly did not comprise the whole of the latter-day Holy Land. This study provides one very important strand for the tangled story of Palestine/Israel. It ...”

“... exceptional students, then the ‘even higher leap’ to an Ivy League college ‘which I would be wise not to name’. He went on to serve his country as an officer in World War Two. ‘Who I am in my majority,’ he concludes, ‘and what I do, and whether I am in the criminal trades or not, and where and how I live, must remain my secret because I have a ...”

“... of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in Harlem. We wanted to leaf through the ...”