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“... picked from the gardens of Newstead Abbey. ‘Iris Origo, like Byron, was soaked in Italy,’ said Michael Foot, who cited her book as the inspiration for his own writings about the poet. The comment is apposite also for The Merchant of Prato, which is steeped in the landscape and culture of Tuscany as much as in a particular period of its history. Though she ...”

“... where he had the support of Deleuze and Guattari, he continued his academic career in Paris (Michael Hardt was a student) until 1997, when he voluntarily returned to Italy to serve out the remainder of his sentence.Negri’s attempt to retheorise the autonomist strategy began during his first spell in prison, with a study of Spinoza. He found in Spinoza ...”

“... Nothing became her life like the remaking of it, but there were so many remakes. The latest stars Madonna, but the earliest starred Eva María Duarte herself. Or was that María Eva Ibarguren? She was María Eva Duarte de Perón on her marriage certificate, but then she also took three years off her age on that occasion. Some of this is easily unravelled, and a number of the remakes are easy to name: country kid to city girl, dancer to actress, brunette to blonde, actress to politician, President’s wife to secular saint ...”

“... Does anyone still think Shakespeare’s comedies provide happy endings for their heroines? Come to that, does anyone still think Shakespeare’s comedies have either ‘happy endings’ or ‘heroines’? There certainly wasn’t much in the way of feminocentric festive renewal going on in Stratford this summer: Steven Pimlott’s unusually bleak As You Like It – which appeared to be set at midwinter in the hold of a container ship – gave the impression that the RSC has forgotten why marriage to either Orlando or Rosalind ever looked interesting, let alone a cause for rejoicing ...”

“... In​  Singin’ in the Rain (1952), the curtain rises on Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on the night of the premiere of The Royal Rascal (‘The Biggest Picture of 1927’). The crowd outside jostles and gawks at Monumental Pictures’ galaxy of stars. First to arrive, to cheers and wolf whistles, is Zelda Zanders, ‘darling of the flapper set’, an all-American feisty redhead ...”

“... forum, temple etc) as a prototype for subsequent empire-building – including, in the idiom of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, our own Empire of supranational sovereignty and global capitalism. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping is a compendium of 45 essays by 15 participants with the usual killer images and stats (for example, yearly sales at ...”

“... It is time for a change, even in the small world of historical epithets. For ages, philosophers and historians have been haunted by intellectual tags, such as Was ist Aufklärung? There have been a number of distinguished replies to this question of what the Enlightenment consisted in, but its resilience has appeared to be connected to its unanswerability ...”

“... taste of his own, Haitink became the victim of those who had to decide things for him. In Michael Waldman’s unsparing television documentary The House, the hapless Haitink is seen to be flabbergasted as the head of the opera company, Nicholas Payne, tries to sell him the director Richard Jones’s scheme for the Ring. In Die Walküre Fricka would ...”

“... The service was dignified, the Dean’s sermon well said, the lesson read by a former evacuee, Michael Aspel. ‘A voice was heard in Rama, sobbing in bitter grief; it was Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted.’ The music was magnificent, spoiled only by a soprano warbling something about ‘Sleepy little eyes in a sleepy little ...”

“... explain what Hippomenes is doing in such a strange position. Reni was surely right to show Saint Michael and Samson in triumph rather than in combat: triumph is more easily reconciled with beauty. But Reni’s figures are beautiful because they are transfigured by heavenly grace, enraptured by some high ideal, or because it is essential to their pathos. The ...”

“... Such arduous processes were nonetheless used to produce vast quantities of text. The late Michael Clanchy estimated that the English royal government put out around thirty thousand documents a year as early as the second half of the 12th century. Using the ingenious method of calculating the expenditure on the wax used to seal documents, Clanchy found ...”

“... Celebration was concerned, modern ended in the 1930s. The future as defined by the brochure from Michael Eisner’s Disney Corporation was to be found not in Walt’s skyscrapers and monorails, but in a long-lost past of white picket fences and pastel dormer windows, so lost that perhaps it was entirely mythic: There was once a place where neighbours ...”

“... more than anyone else he acted out the strange mass subjectivity of the Pop image-world. As Michael Warner has argued, ‘to be public in the West means to have an iconicity . . . In the figures of Elvis, Liz, Michael, Oprah, Geraldo, Brando and the like, we witness and transact the bloating, slimming, wounding, and ...”

“... of all Scots’, so there is some excuse for me. On the other hand most of us have heard of Michael Miliken, of whose Law-like career Buchan offers a vivid sketch. He could ‘create money with a single sentence’, his salary in 1986 was $550 million, which, on the Buchan-approved capitalisation model of Sir William Petty (20 times one’s annual ...”

“... 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 ...”