“... a way out of terminal ennui.The saints and their wild doings, the angels and their extraordinary powers, now mischievously recorded by Eliot Weinberger, may have helped enliven the days assigned to them. The strangeness of such religious material again and again makes it incomprehensible that such figures should be considered holy, but if you look instead at ...”

“... to be fed up with the Democrats’ inability to get bills through Congress.In What It Took to Win, Michael Kazin traces the history over the past two centuries of what he calls ‘the oldest mass party in the world’. Kazin has been engaged with Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John ...”

“... that was the question of standards. Leavis’s talent as a critic came precisely from his rigorous powers of selection. They were reasoned, though they might seem arbitrary, and they had the salutary effect of making the reader ask himself just what it was that was good or bad about a work of art. Priestley did not want to ask that question. For him, as he ...”

“... The camp, death, destruction become madhouse normality for him. Suffering bestows prophetic powers (the maimed seer is a recurring figure in Ballard’s fiction): in visions of terrible incandescence, Jim foresees American firebombing of Japan, the atomic destruction of Nagasaki, and – ultimately – World War Three. In clinical terms, ‘real’ war ...”

“... position by launching a final, overwhelming attack on the Allied armies in the West. Operation Michael, as it was named, deployed new and highly effective artillery tactics: enemy guns and command posts were targeted before a ‘creeping barrage’ that moved ahead of the advancing infantry was laid down, forcing the defenders to stay under cover until the ...”

“... to meritocratic independence – indeed, it was often alleged, to outright republicanism. As Michael Franklin suggests in his excellent biography, Jones must have relished upending the patron-client hierarchy when he got Althorp elected to Samuel Johnson’s Turk’s Head Club, where Jones had mingled with Burke and Gibbon before even Boswell was ...”

“... now two, to live with my aunt in Essex. After leaving Patrick, I went to live with a writer called Michael Alexander who took me to Afghanistan. Several ‘engagements’ (author’s inverted commas) on and she is living with Johnnie, but he wanted a child of his own before Patrick returned to live with them. So ‘when my aunt brought Patrick to the London ...”

“... triumph of the cult of personality is that it can expose its emptiness without losing its magic. Michael Rogin’s brilliant collection of essays, ‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, attempts to account for and destroy this magic by restoring the two dimensions it has effaced: history and psychic interiority. The title ...”

“... has brought more professional skill to the debasement of British public life than you,’ Michael Heseltine recently taunted Mandelson, who beamed back appreciatively. Indeed, so fixed has Mandelson become in the political imagination as Tony Blair’s Rasputin and High Priest of Spin that he is sometimes still dismissed as a bit of a cartoon ...”

“... and explaining the natural world, and religion to studying human purposes, meanings and values. Michael Ruse’s book is an astonishing contribution to this literature. It astonishes because of the bravado of its thesis. Instead of espousing Gould’s tame view that religion and science are distinct but complementary, Ruse, a philosopher and historian of ...”

“... him of the right-wing Zionists’ interest in the IRA (‘My pseudonym in the underground was Michael, you know, after Michael Collins’): ‘A man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe one thing and one thing only – that by his act he will change the course of history.’ The ...”

“... Roy Foster’s review in the New Republic was entitled ‘’Tisn’t’. But however unlikely his powers of recall or underdrawn his characters, McCourt’s books and manner are engaging. The historian Richard White describes his book as an ‘anti-memoir’. White, who teaches history at Stanford, has traced the story of another post-Independence immigrant ...”

“... Jubilee Line stations. Pick saw all this design work as means to a moral end. A recent study by Michael Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England (1999), dubs him a ‘medieval Modernist’: by which is meant that Pick regarded the purpose of design, and indeed the whole working of the Underground, in the utopian tradition of Ruskin, Morris and Ebenezer ...”

“... seeking to remedy the ailments of the body, ‘Christians were effectively seeking to consume the powers of the immortal soul.’ Protestant doctrine, with its tendency to reduce the Eucharistic feast to an enacted metaphor, might have been expected to weaken the analogy between mumia and the sacraments. Indeed Protestant polemicists often held the literalism ...”

“... history of an art may be understood as stages in the revelation of the art’s characteristic powers’? Isn’t that what Perez means when he writes of ‘the properties and possibilities of the medium’? Not necessarily. It would depend on whether Perez thought that those properties and possibilities were inherent in the medium or something the medium ...”