“... acts done in his Lady Lettice’s time. Not forgotten his fowling piece in England nor the straight-bodied laundresses in the red petticoats during his abode in Flanders beyond the seas, of all the which Dudley denied not one point, hoping that St Peter because of his bald head had been a goodfellow in times past as well as he himself. St ...”

“... a third time. Trump was going to win Florida, despite the millions of dollars spent there by Michael Bloomberg, and he was storming ahead of his 2016 numbers in Ohio. The other swing states were closer, but they seemed to be moving his way. On CNN I registered the same dramatic shift in mood. A couple of talking heads looked to be on the verge of ...”

“... such excellent studies in the accurately entitled Literary Lives series (published by Palgrave) as Michael O’Neill’s Percy Bysshe Shelley (1989) or Caroline Franklin’s Byron (2000), not-very-literary biographies, some running to four hundred and more pages, continue to accumulate in the bookshops. There (presumably) they attract readers far more ...”

“... Country. He said that he’d bought the farm mainly because he wanted to build it up for his son, Michael, who worked alongside him. But a month ago he’d driven into Ixopo to get some provisions when the farm radio in his bakkie sounded an alarm ‘for Mr Arthur or Michael Mitchell’. Either Mitchell Sr or Mitchell Jr ...”

“... in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms’. On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial comment was: ‘I have more than once been asked whether I could account for the outburst of exuberant joy evidenced in this celebrated lyric; I am unable to do ...”

“... I was put at the bottom of the list when all the great figures such as Bertrand Russell and Michael Foot had gone home: However, for some reason I put the audience in a frenzy. After I had finished and gone home, the audience swarmed out and laid siege to No 10 Downing Street. It was a very satisfactory start to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. For ...”

“... they both committed suicide, Carla in 1910, Julia in 1927, just as two of Mann’s sons, Klaus and Michael, would commit suicide.) ‘At an early age,’ Katia Mann wrote of her mother-in-law, ‘the foreign girl married Senator or Consul Heinrich Mann. She had definite artistic talents, played the piano quite nicely and sang. My husband learned the entire ...”

“... at that, now,’ her mother, a perfume magnate whose Protestant husband died nastily for Michael Collins, says of a cup of tea: ‘Strong enough to trot a mouse on.’ He amuses himself, also, by playing up the hero’s drink problem – Marlowe has to be helped into a taxi, passes out in his clothes, throws up – and having him grouse about his ...”

“... but her mother was determined she should attend a good secretarial college so that she could go ‘straight into a really high-class post’ – she began as a shorthand typist in a bank in Regent Street. In later life Johnson said that she never doubted ‘that I should have had a fine acting career, if migraines hadn’t stopped me’; this is characteristic ...”

“... any science’ was, according to the Graves account, seen off without trouble by a single straight left. And in spite of his undoubted awe of, and need for, Laura Riding, he remained like a small boy wholly fascinated by himself, and with no time for other writers or poets such as Yeats – an obvious rival in magical charisma. The secret of his ...”

“... would have presented little problem to a marauding Zulu impi, unless that of throwing its assegais straight while doubled up with laughter. It is more plausible to take the scrum as the most explicit physical expression of the male bonding which Making Men sees at the heart of its subject. The opportunities which it gave for respectable touching (amplified by ...”

“... more than others of the same size – appalled him.Scenes based on the Signal Hill meetings went straight into the manuscript of Oil! By June 1925, Sinclair was predicting it would be ‘the best thing I have ever done’. The story begins in 1912, when the oil-powered world was still in its infancy. We first encounter our protagonist, thirteen-year-old ...”

“... but not an intraduisible in sight. As for the achievement of Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood in orchestrating the English edition, that qualifies as heroic. The French and English differ in certain important respects concerning both the choice of terms and the word order. The English has ‘philosophical lexicon’ where the French has ...”

“... to lose.’The book falters in what comes next, the chapter shared by two directors, Hal Ashby and Michael Cimino. (I think Specktor realises that directors have lost their juice now.) Ashby is someone whose work you know better than you can place him – Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Being There. Cimino is an exemplary disaster: after the abrupt coup of The Deer ...”

“... contemporary life, and in which normality (roughly defined as suburban life, middling marriage, straight sex, drugless culture) is shown up, with different degrees of irony or scepticism. A terrible artist’s snobbery is at work here, even in the best of these five books, Alice Hoffman’s Seventh Heaven and ...”