“... in Rome and supplying them with cash.One of his jokes involved an escapee British general, Michael Gambier-Parry, who was renowned as a forger. O’Flaherty took him to Irish parties and introduced him to senior German officers as an Irish doctor. Gambier-Parry found safe lodgings with a group of nuns, the Blue Sisters.Another figure who aided those ...”

“... and Greenwich were finer than any view in the world, even in Constantinople; and at Backbury Hill, in Herefordshire, Evelyn had learned, there was an ideal site for his Elysium. It was ‘no phantasticall Utopia but a reall place’, with a mountain, groves of oak, a green plain, ‘a most horrid and deepe precipice, fitted for Solitary Grotts and ...”

“... that was celebrated in stories, songs, sand sculpture, ochre paint. Every rock, river, mountain, hill, camp, track and ritual spot on the continent has had many names in its time, so that even the most deserted place has a history. The imprint of the first inhabitants has been overlaid: in the last two hundred years, all parts of the continent have been ...”

“... in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from Cambridge, Michael Frayn. Oliver said that he had fried and eaten a placenta. At that time I don’t think I knew what a placenta was except that I knew it didn’t come with chips.11 September. David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he ...”

“... known at all, as one of a group of youngish Conservatives who had been christened ‘the Notting Hill set’ by Derek Conway, an MP from a rival faction. In this context, Notting Hill, where Cameron and many of his friends live, connotes wealth, organic food, possible drugginess and a degree of social ...”

“... Millennium Experience, set ablaze. Flames visible across the river from Beckton Alp to Parliament Hill. ‘A man said to have a slight Irish accent said: “This is the IRA. We have planted bombs at the southern entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel. For goodness sake, do something about it. We want the area cleared.”’ So Gareth Parry reported in the Guardian ...”

“... corps dutifully reported the official Pentagon version of events. A US navy captain called Mark Hill, who was working on a project for McNamara, eventually let Hersh in on the real, catastrophic story. (Hill was one of the honourable soldiers on whom Hersh came to rely.) ‘I remember being angry, of course, but also more ...”

“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”

“... born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had ...”

“... opponents may derive from scenes like that of President Reagan scurrying around Capitol Hill to drum up support for the International Monetary Fund – an institution he had spent a lifetime denouncing as an organ of crypto-communist world government – why should the Third World debt crisis be remembered by history, even after the debts are ...”

“... to The Words upon the Window-Pane, come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to ...”

“... Perfect examples of what this sort of thing leads to were provided by the missions to Moscow of Michael Foot and later of Neil Kinnock. The Kremlin’s defence specialists, accustomed to Bundestag deputies able to discuss throw-weights, Mirving, telemetry and so forth, discovered that the British MPs, for all their passionate dedication to disarmament, had ...”

“... Zidi in François Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks; sometimes female, such as Gina McKee in Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland, Christina Ricci in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm and Chloë Sevigny in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco; and occasionally male and heterosexual but out of sorts, like Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Mike Figgis’s The Loss of ...”

“... an adventure. I go into Stratford to look at the Swan, the new RSC auditorium. Its architect, Michael Reardon, has done a stunning job – almost literally, since the steep concentrated space feels physically violent. People talk about Blackfriars as its model, but Reardon says that when invited to fit a structure inside the old rehearsal rooms, he ...”

“... Goering abandoned the Blitz. He could not be a giant-killer, but he made fools of the giants. Michael Heseltine, as Secretary for the Environment, bungled the legislation to cut the GLC’s revenue. The judiciary made imbeciles of themselves in their eagerness to crush the cheap fares policy by pronouncing, in effect, that all forms of subsidy were a ...”