“... 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 ...”

“... him, and he travels westward in the story’s visionary conclusion to do battle with the shade of Michael Furey. Snow is ‘general over Ireland’ while he does so; not only here, but in Muldoon’s last collection Hay, the colour white functions as a motif of death. One of Louis MacNeice’s best-known poems is about snow and turns up in Muldoon’s poem ...”

“... of The Old Crowd was Stephen Frears, but in real terms it was LWT and its then head of programmes, Michael Grade. Used as I was to the BBC and to my regular producer, Innes Lloyd, I found LWT entirely well-meaning but awkward to work with only because it wasn’t an organisation geared to producing drama. ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bridges, starving hospitals of funds, is part of a suicide-note delirium. When the worst is coming straight at you at a thousand miles a minute, embrace it. Evelyn made this entry in his diary for Sunday, 2 September 1666:After dinner the fire continuing, with my Wife & Sonn took Coach & went to the bank side in Southwark, where we beheld that dismal ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... see, And sink them in the river as they swim. GUISE: ‘Tis well advised, Dumaine; go see it straight be done. [Exit DUMAINE] And in the meantime, my lord, could we devise To get those pedants from the King Navarre That are tutors to him and the Prince of Condé – ANJOU: For that, let me alone; cousin, stay you here, And when you see me in, then ...”

“... also included in the volume. The conversation is quirky and illuminating, with Russell playing the straight man, the practical critic, the questioner, while Wollen plays the celebrity scholar looking back over the theory wars. We learn that Wollen wrote Signs and Meaning ‘in the month of May 1968’, which is impressive for all sorts of reasons, and that he ...”

“... of the natural world and derives from Pliny’s Natural History. The 15th-century mariner Michael of Rhodes, who wrote a treatise on shipbuilding as part of an ambitious composition documenting navigation, mathematics and astronomy, urges his reader not to begin anything on ‘the first Monday of April, because on this day Cain killed his ...”

“... a more businesslike arrangement than popular legend allows. Conway gets German occupation policy straight – the essential first step in any study of collaboration. The Germans governed their conquests in a variety of ways: direct Nazi Party rule after the annihilation of local authority, as in Poland; Nazi Party rule through the local administration, as in ...”

“... Benetton-Ford, Ferrari and what is now McLaren-Peugeot, had been catching up. And Benetton had Michael Schumacher, ten years younger and the one driver whose talent was now close to Senna’s own. Senna was openly anxious at the start of the year. He went out of the first two races in incidents that could have been caused by nerves. He was the only driver ...”

“... were about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag.’ ‘Bloody awful, all of it,’ she tells us straight off. The deals the company is working on pump up or destroy businesses, employ or lay off hundreds of thousands of people. She knows this, and she knows they have the power to sink Third World economies. Half-understood, seemingly arbitrary actions may ...”

“... first time I saw, or looked repeatedly at, a painting by Frank Auerbach was in the art historian Michael Podro’s living room – it must have been in 1968. The painting was Primrose Hill, Autumn Morning. I’d barely heard of Auerbach at that point (modern painting for me was French and American), and I certainly didn’t have a clue who had done the ...”

“... as can be.  When the war ended Theo resolved that he would make his way back home alone, in a straight line, without twists or turns. The distance to his home was great, hundreds of miles. Nevertheless it seemed to him he could see the route clearly. He knew that this would separate him from people, and that he would have to remain in uninhabited places ...”

“... BROOKS.’ Over the years, the rowdy writers’ room also included Simon, Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Michael Stewart, Joseph Stein and Woody Allen. Tolkin, who was head writer on all Caesar’s shows in the 1950s, said that ‘no other comedian needed material to open his mouth as much as he did, being an uneducated lout.’The writers’ room was a storytelling ...”