“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

“... In 1917, justifying his reluctance to involve the United States in the European war, Woodrow Wilson told his secretary of state that ‘white civilisation and its domination over the world rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact.’ Hysteria about ‘white civilisation’ gripped America after Europe’s self-mutilation in the First ...”

“... to look for ways of remaining unapologetically gay writers without writing ‘gay novels’. Michael Cunningham won a large readership with The Hours, in which gay lives featured without being allowed to predominate, though his touch seems less sure in his most recent offering, By Nightfall. A narrative about a married man’s brief and inconclusive ...”

“... rather than too few, plausible hypotheses. To borrow a sociobiological example from Edward O. Wilson, cicada aggregations can be explained within the theory of natural selection as bringing the sexes together for mating, as permitting loud enough singing to confuse predators, or as saturating the local predators with a superabundance of prey. As ...”

“... have played a bad hand well. Going into the 1970 election, he seemed the obvious choice to succeed Wilson as Labour leader, and prime minister, whenever the latter stood down. But after Labour unexpectedly lost the election, the question of entry into Europe again became a live political issue. Jenkins, believing that Britain should be part of what eventually ...”

“... Alex Salmond’s predecessor as leader of the Scottish National Party, the social democrat Gordon Wilson, happened to be our local MP in East Dundee. The gap between him and radical socialists like George Galloway, then cutting his teeth in the bear pit of the Dundee Labour Party, was great, but seemed neither so great nor so significant as the gap between ...”

“... a guise of compassion.Later the same year A Minority by ‘Gordon Westwood’ (the sociologist Michael Schofield) presented the results of interviews with 127 queer men, with statistical breakdowns of where and how often they found partners, and of patterns of friendship and courtship which turned out to be much like hetero ones. The result is pleasingly ...”

“... compressed three vertebrae but never lost consciousness. My English professor and mentor, the poet Michael Heffernan, was first down the stairs and out the door to where I had landed. I must have appeared somewhat dazed and breathless. ‘Did you hit your head?’ he kept asking once he had determined I was alive. ‘What day is it?’ ‘Who is the President ...”

“... in this study – not only his rapport with Irish-America, but the influence of President Wilson on his policies and tactics. The belief that Dev’s responsibility for and role in the Civil War were minor is more controversial; and even more so is the claim that the sectarianism of the Constitution was justified because it involved a tacit ...”

“... 85 per cent of their trade in dollars.In Trade Wars Are Class Wars (2020), Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis showed that the US functions as the world’s importer of last resort – absorbing the trade surpluses of Europe and China – and that the American working class pays the price. But they didn’t discuss the power that accrues to the US through ...”

“... in secondary schools and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these ...”

“... pygmies compared to the Labour leadership contest that took place the following year. When Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister the candidates lined up to replace him included Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot and Denis Healey. It was, by any historical standards, an impressive cast ...”

“... elected in 1982, long before that distant nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one insisted that it ‘absolutely does ...”

“... the Second World War, died in 1990 while translating the Iliad. His version was completed by Wilson Wong, who learned his Greek at Moscow State University in the 1960s, and who went on to translate the Odyssey as well, in verse form. Until then, China’s only translation from the Greek had been in prose, by the celebrated Yang Xianyi, who with his ...”

“... United States in the year following its publication – even such serious-minded critics as Edmund Wilson and the young Lionel Trilling regularly disparaged her as spinsterish, middlebrow and reactionary: a kind of tiresome maiden aunt in the back parlour of American letters. True, Cather had her defenders – but as Acocella grimly notes, they were prone to ...”