“... discusses the rise of a large, literate reading public (the first in history, Raymond Williams thought). In a big book I could find only two tiny slips: the Australian novelist Christina Stead is called ‘New Zealand-based’ (a confusion with the critic and novelist C.K. Stead), and the Nicolson of Weidenfeld and Nicolson receives a spurious ...”

“... to be earlier stages in the survey. The transition ‘From Memory to Written Record’, charted by Michael Clanchy a quarter-century ago, has no more eloquent harbinger. There hadn’t been anything like it before; or if there had, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicler had never heard of it. Yet the system it documents so thoroughly was not introduced by the survey, or ...”

“... by eminent thinkers of Africa and the Caribbean, from C.L.R. James, George Padmore and Eric Williams of Trinidad, to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Michael Manley of Jamaica. The New International Economic Order (NIEO) called for and the 1974 charter of economic rights put forward by the UN ...”

“... hard to manage. But he had a mixture of brute and poet that Kazan urged on Selznick and Tennessee Williams.That was just the start, for in rehearsal Kazan built up Stanley’s role, and lavished attention on his guy. In the text, it is Blanche’s play – and in its subsequent history it has become a vehicle for spectacular actresses. But Kazan was edgy at ...”

“... the bold lettering VENEREAL DISEASES, a colleague came to the desk and Charles shut the directory. Michael said, ‘Have you spoken to anyone here this morning yet?’ ‘No.’ Michael was American, too. They worked in an American investment company. ‘No one’s told you about Harold Cripps?’ ‘No.’ ...”

“... Materialism’, much of its activity remains most fruitfully grounded in the work of Raymond Williams. Both Evans and Dollimore offer powerful examples of the unsettling purchase this newly historicised and politicised British criticism can obtain on the Elizabethan past and the Thatcherised present. Latterly, British concerns have started to make their ...”

“... she quoted an exchange between Joan of Arc and her interrogators about her vision of the archangel Michael: ‘How did you know that it was St Michael?’ ‘By the way he spoke and his language of angels.’ ‘How did you know it was the language of angels?’ ‘I soon believed it was. I wanted to believe that it ...”

“... last joke in 1988 when she made an appearance on Aspel and Company, the ITV chat show hosted by Michael Aspel, one of a handful of Alan Partridgesque men who for decades had a monopoly on interviewing film stars on British TV. Taylor had recently completed her second stint at the Betty Ford Centre, where she was treated for alcoholism and other addictions ...”

“... in secondary schools and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these ...”

“... dissociating himself from the unilateral disarmament advocated by his close allies, including Michael Foot, Ian Mikardo and Crossman. Bevan believed that possession of the Bomb would be necessary for the protection of a postcolonial, democratic socialist non-aligned bloc. ‘Without its own nuclear deterrent,’ Thomas-Symonds ventriloquises, ‘Britain ...”

“... the literary agent, who is the dedicatee of Duffy. Harder to crack is the pseudonymous code of Michael Crichton, the omnicompetent ‘movelist’. (He is author of The Andromeda Strain, director and producer of Coma, director and scriptwriter of Westworld.) Crichton stands six feet seven inches tall. Two of his writing pseudonyms are ‘John Lange’ and ...”

“... in and of itself – all too often ‘a gesture of admiring incomprehension’, to quote Michael Wood – is rather meaningless. Unfortunately, Walker can’t tell how, or at least he can’t tell me. (Rosen can and does.) He simply supplies Schopenhauer’s definition (the talented hit targets others can’t reach: the genius ‘hits a target the ...”

“... set by Britten, for instance, a nodding acquaintance only, or Rubbra, Maconchy, Lutyens, Vaughan Williams or John Ireland, say much about the ramifications and happenstance of the Popular Front, little about the value of Swingler’s words, which can often be pretty trite. Certainly, he thought this work important and said so, but for performance, not ...”

“... names. One of the most noteworthy was The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), edited by Michael Roberts. In 1932, Roberts, a contributor to the Criterion, had edited for the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press a poetry anthology called New Signatures – a symptom of an international rush towards the ‘new’. Geoffrey Grigson’s magazine New Verse ...”

“... in a few paragraphs. She works, as she acknowledges, in the shadow of the extraordinary labours of Michael Millgate, whose revised biography of 2004 is the standard scholarly account. Millgate is invaluable, the definitive authority; but as he himself might admit, his very scrupulousness tends to slow down his narrative, gnarling it in necessary footnotes and ...”