“... 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 ...”

“... and 1970s. There is an omnivorousness about her understanding of desire which brings with it a wise form of toleration. Perhaps her greatest skill, however, is one for which she’s rarely praised and for which she herself would probably not have wanted praise. She is exceptionally good at describing gravity-defying feats of engineering. So in The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about diverting, strange, glamorous subjects – and that glamour should not be taken seriously. He was also writing pieces in his own highly original style – pieces that were often ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... now trying to do. The results are extremely impressive, especially with those contributors (like Michael Lapidge on ‘The Stoic Inheritance’) who are prepared to go right back to the beginning and to explain not only what the Middle Ages did inherit, but also what they (and we) have lost. Yet a doubt hangs over the whole exercise, voiced by Dronke ...”

“... the morning before facing the House, agreed that she might be finished. (A colleague had dismissed Michael Heseltine as ‘the sort of chap who has to buy his own furniture’. But Heseltine has money. And his hair. On his angry exit through Number 10, he stopped in the lavatory to arrange it, before emerging a free and in Thatcher’s eyes dangerously ...”