“... in The Cinema of Isolation nevertheless uses disability themes in a uniquely disorienting way: Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1988), best known as a sort of prequel to The Silence of the Lambs, with Brian Cox doing a turn as Hannibal Lecter. The serial killer in the film is an Obsessive Avenger with a vengeance, murdering entire families of strangers ...”

“... homily, a quasi-secular point in the mass. But it didn’t work out that way. A protester called Michael Petrelis stood up on a pew and started shouting. Another activist, Tom Keane, received the host, then impulsively crushed it and dropped it on the floor. Schulman was in the cathedral that day, although she doesn’t use her experience as a lens through ...”

“... between the upper and the lower cases. Almost everyone is some sort of nationalist, including even Michael Forsyth, the new Tory Secretary of State for Scotland. In retreat, the Conservatives have discovered that true Unionism awarded Scotland just as much nationalism as was good for it, via Scots Law, institutional autonomy and new devices like the National ...”

“... now facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by ...”

“... was a tape-recorded conversation between Hamilton and the First Secretary to the Treasury, Michael Heseltine, in which Hamilton denied any ‘financial relationship’ with Ian Greer. Greer knew he had paid, and realised his fellow plaintive would be exposed in court as a liar. He told Hamilton he wanted to fight the case separately, with a new set of ...”

“... down as chairman of BSkyB. According to some people, like the secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, the Sun’s former editor Kelvin MacKenzie and its current associate editor Trevor Kavanagh, one of the unfortunate victims of the phone-hacking scandal is News International itself. The company is being pilloried for practices that were ...”

“... Two people I knew have died: Maurice Berger, an art critic, curator and civil rights activist; and Michael Sorkin, the radical architect and critic. A friend at the Whitney told me of a staff member in his late forties, a father of two, who had died of the virus.The pain of social distancing and isolation isn’t negligible, but neither is it lethal, and in ...”

“... flagrantly illegitimate. He was opposed to political violence, though he dined with the IRA leader Michael Collins three days before his death in an ambush. He also spoke alongside the revolutionary James Connolly in the Albert Hall in 1913, when he insisted that citizens engaged in political protest should form their own force to defend themselves against ...”

“... standards, were eventually supplemented by the expert comments of Pierre Legouis and Elsie Duncan-Jones in a revised third edition of 1971. Comment on the lyric poetry now became more adventurous, not only because the new editors knew so much but because there was so much recent criticism and analysis to consider. Other editions both major and minor ...”

“... that ‘it would sound like a circus.’ It was her second book. The first, a life of Burne-Jones, appeared two years earlier, in 1975, when she was nearly 60. Until then child-rearing, teaching, a difficult marriage and the constant struggle to keep the family afloat – which failed several times, once literally when their houseboat sank in the Thames ...”

“... as a collector is merely a hoarder who has space for his stuff). This is one of the reasons Michael Landy’s Break Down (2001), the artwork in which he systematically destroyed all his possessions – including his passport, his birth certificate and his father’s sheepskin coat – in a shop window on Oxford Street, was so provocative. It felt not ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... life reaching us effectively pre-satirised, it’s worth looking at the 2003 media coverage of Michael Carroll, a lotto lout who seems to have chosen the role of John the Baptist to Amis’s rough beast of incarnate chavhood. Carroll, twenty, banned from driving, turned the grounds of his Norfolk villa into a 24-hour race track for old cars. He let off ...”

“... was going through Vanessa Redgrave’s mind every time she referred to her screen husband as ‘Michael’, the name of her own father, whose sexual nature was more complicatedly divided. The third section of The Sparsholt Affair is set in London, with Johnny Sparsholt now 21, his surname causing a stir wherever it’s mentioned. He explores London while ...”

“... in Britain. When Pilkington Glass went public a Scottish architect of no great distinction, Michael Spens, became a millionaire. He bought Studio International, which as the Studio had been publishing since 1893. It had more institutional subscribers – i.e. annually renewed subscriptions by libraries both here and abroad – than the whole print run ...”