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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the desert. (The portrayal of the ashram owes something to Frances Fitzgerald’s book Cities on a Hill and its account of the would-be city of Rajneeshpuram. Updike’s Arhat – ‘Deserving One’ – shares with the leader of Rajneeshpuram, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Bernard Levin’s one-time hero, a fondness for sweeping past his adoring followers in ...”

“... and a word from Yeats: ‘The dawn moved along the rim of the mountains and as I went down’ the hill felt the new day come up around me and felt life begin once more its ancient, ceaseless gyre.’ The trouble is that O’Faolain, on his hero’s behalf, is trying to make me feel more, and more tenderly, than anything the story compels me to feel. He is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for his shabby dealing with the splendid notion of Great Birnam wood advancing upon high Dunsinane hill. The Merton Professor of English Language and Literature admits with some complacency to ‘not being specially well read in modern English’ and to ‘no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English novel’. And so with individual ...”

“... forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes. Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea is Niall Ferguson. Only an American empire, he insists, can secure order in a dangerous, unruly world. He does not ...”

“... If​ universities had been an invention of the second half of the 20th century,’ Michael Dummett wondered in his last book, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), ‘would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied?’ Dummett’s anxiety wasn’t whether philosophy could survive at a time when the value of a university education is gauged in increasingly reductive, economic terms ...”