“... of homosexuality in 1967 had opened up new possibilities, but the thaw was gradual. Michael Holroyd’s great biography of Lytton Strachey, published that year, was prophetic of an unembarrassed candour about gay lives, rather than a response to new freedoms; P.N. Furbank’s Life of Forster was still two years in the future, and other ...”

“... that or return the publisher’s advance), calling his debut Doings and Undoings. The columnist Michael Kinsley once observed that Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, and Podhoretz was an old critic’s version of a young critic, publishing in the proper publications and bemoaning hairy barbarians like the Beats (‘The Know-Nothing ...”

“... previously been balanced by the legislature? In the United States, Congress has been reluctant to grant new powers to suppress information. That is the reason why Presidents have increasingly asked courts to act in the absence of legislation. But it is the very reason why courts should take care before making new law. Those are the themes that I see in the ...”

“... and Palestinian groups. His neoconservative comrade at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, was more explicit in conversation with Turner: ‘Iraq is not what it’s all about. We have been at war for twenty years with a terror network supported by Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia . . . Now, like it or not, we’re in a regional ...”

“... Nova Liben, near the gold-mining town of Jilove, south of Prague; this estate was part of a huge grant of lands from Count Rozmberk. Then came news of the heavy fine meted out to Kelley: 15,000 thalers (some of it apparently a ‘debt’ to the royal exchequer, to pay the expenses of his arrest and imprisonment, though we know from Gregor Böul’s later ...”

“... the Host into the body of Christ cracked like an egg. In his book Goodbye! Good Men, author Michael Rose writes that the liberalised rules set up a takeover of seminaries by homosexuals.   Vatican II liberalised rules but left the most outdated one: celibacy. That vow was put in place originally because the Church did not want heirs making claims on ...”

“... slim volumes of these to appear, both of which he came to dislike, he was hesitant thereafter to grant permission for any more collections. Even as late as 1955, when Edel edited a Selected Letters, his work was still overseen by the family. ‘I remember removing a letter dealing with Guy Domville from the Selected Letters,’ Edel wrote, ‘because Billy ...”

“... now ambulance men ban kiss of life’; ‘Policeman flees Aids victim.’ In the early days, Michael Adler of Middlesex Hospital remembered, it was very difficult to get them hospitalised, it was very difficult to get patients treated as normal human beings. People were frightened, they thought it was contagious, the patients had to be put in side ...”

“... famous black writer in America. Wright encouraged Baldwin, read his work and recommended him for a grant. And, just as important, Wright offered him an example by going to live in Paris in 1946. (In 1952 Beauford Delaney, too, moved there.) When Baldwin arrived in November 1948, he found Wright sitting at a table in St-Germain. Wright introduced him to the ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”

“... in middle age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... was historically identified in Chinese minds with her greatest humiliation, and saw no reason to grant independence, Singapore-style, to a colonised corner of the motherland, then all that was left was to discover what China would offer Britain for returning Hong Kong to the landlord (with his hand on the water-tap) in good working order. In Hong ...”

“... that they actually believed their extraordinary promise to replace every EU support payment, grant and subsidy after Brexit. Voters lied to themselves: many pretended to think that immigrants were responsible for public decay, when in reality they just disliked ‘too many foreigners in our streets’. An English rebellion against control by cynical ...”

“... discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights. A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a ...”

“... The latter envisages a kind of global ethics, ambitious and unwieldy: the echoes here are from Michael Dummett and Onora O’Neill and might be dismissed as utopian, were it not for the fact that human movement across borders is set to continue, with or without an international consensus about how it’s regulated.In Europe, the most startling ...”