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“... time a splendid tonic. Byrne, his last and posthumous novel – and in verse – is another one. Michael Byrne, a Lancashire Irishman like Burgess, was ‘a minor artist with a two-stringed bow’, as a composer and a painter. He is also a cosmopolitan father, a Don Juan, but not, oddly enough, a poet. (Burgess’s technique is always to produce the obvious ...”

“... Scouts spotting mines in the Mersey, involuntarily did his bit for the Third Reich by putting his foot through the hull of a canoe. The first I knew of the docks was the cranes you could see from Wallasey. You could look out across the river at them from the bottom of the street where my grandparents had a B&B – a place of endless passages and landings, or ...”

“... to treat Lawrence as simply the preux chevalier, the schoolboyish hero of derring-do romance. Michael Asher in his fine biographical study, Lawrence the Uncrowned King of Arabia, does not attempt to do so. Asher, who has travelled by camel and by foot where Lawrence went before him, is intensely aware of the genuine ...”

“... has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various factional groupings and dining clubs, such as Nick’s Diner, the Lollards and the Tory Reform Group.The ...”

“... and the juxtaposition of Goethe with Hitler – these are the two narrative axes along which Michael Kater tells the story of Weimar. It was the capital of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, a small duchy in the fragmented landscape of the Holy Roman Empire. Cranach lived there briefly, and Bach served even more briefly as court musician, but Weimar was otherwise ...”

“... such as Prescott, Blunkett and Hain merged into the Blairite mass or, like Margaret Beckett, Michael Meacher and Kinnock himself, became bit players on the political stage, Cook remained a prominent and prickly reminder of the electoral calculations that had won Blair the leadership in 1994. In this respect, he was undoubtedly helped by being banished to ...”

“... Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up ...”

“... fishermen found another body washed up on a sandbank. It was identified as that of Atabong Michael Atembe, aged 32, also from Cameroon.The boat had sunk about 250 kilometres up the coast, near the state border with Oaxaca. I went there on a quad bike driven by a local teenager. The sand was littered with clothing. I made an inventory: a pair of ...”

“... of personal history and the pretty stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the ...”

“... by every possible means. He told the Chartist William Lovett: ‘I would neither stir hand nor foot to promote any public matter whatever which did not tend to their advantage.’ He expressed the emotional roots of this attitude in a letter to Samuel Rogers, in three sentences with a stirring cadence such as he seldom used (and a possible Shakespearean ...”

“... home has left: what would Walser say to walking back with him in the night, it’s two hours on foot? Walser promptly agrees: The writer then stayed as our guest for a couple of days. Should I say something of his appearance? Well, he doesn’t look the way a reader of his books would imagine him, or a painter paint him. All his books have something ...”

“... Bower of Flora, a House of Night and Diana’s Tree of Chastity, in front of which danced nine 15-foot golden trees. At the end of the dance, each tree opened to reveal a masquer, richly clad in the costume of a ‘wodewose’, or wild man. Early modern playhouses like the Globe could manage nothing on this scale; yet the anonymous Sir Clyomon and Sir ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at the bombed US barracks: ‘Every step, a stab of rage and horror, Here a finger, there a foot, or a hand, a forearm, an ear that improvised sextons picked up and threw in plastic bags like the garbage of a butcher shop: most of the bodies had been in fact dismembered into dozens of pieces.’ Angelo finds a Marine cradling a helmet in his arms ...”