“... place of obligation. Sometimes the two merge, as in the case of the Jewish Austro-Hungarian writer Joseph Roth, who ended up broke in Paris, mourning the dissolution of ‘my fatherland, the only one I have ever had’. ‘His birthplace had been ceded to Poland,’ writes Michael Hofmann, ‘his country – the ...”

“... he said! ‘W.B. Yeats.’ And added: ‘I’m a poet.’ If he had said his name was Michael and declared himself to be an archangel it could not have had a more catastrophic effect upon me. ‘What?’ I exclaimed, ‘Yeats! The Irish poet! My God – well, my God … well … Yeats … well …’ Then I suddenly heard the ghastly sound of my ...”

“... clicks, which Eno put together on the days Bowie had to go into Paris for legal wrangles with Michael Lippman, the lawyer-manager he’d hired to disentangle himself from Defries, and had since fallen out with. His relationship with Angie, which had been essentially over for years, but kept on ice as long as they weren’t seeing each other, was heading ...”

“... this case of the French Ambassador’s secretary, Des Trappes. Also involved in this sham plot was Michael Moody, a former servant of Sir Edward Stafford’s in France and from the late 1580s an associate of Robert Poley, the veteran spy who was one of the men present at Marlowe’s death in Deptford. The early career of Thomas Drury seems to show us a young ...”

“... and Palestinian groups. His neoconservative comrade at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, was more explicit in conversation with Turner: ‘Iraq is not what it’s all about. We have been at war for twenty years with a terror network supported by Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia . . . Now, like it or not, we’re in a regional ...”

“... of Superman was published, in 1938, by two young American Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. As Michael Chabon wrote in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), whose protagonists are loosely based on Siegel and Shuster: ‘Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? … Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.’ Affinities ...”

“... was given some attention during the 2005 papal conclave, when he was the main contender against Joseph Ratzinger after the death of John Paul II. It centred on the arrest and torture of two Jesuit priests, Oswaldo Yorio and Franz Jalics. Bergoglio had known both of them since the early 1960s – they had been his teachers. By the time Bergoglio took over as ...”

“... introduced her to the celluloid experiments of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, Andy Warhol and Michael Snow. At Chelsea’s Elgin Theatre, they watched Snow’s La Région centrale on a loop: ‘a three-hour film about a landscape with stones, blue and grey, and all the possible camera movements over this landscape … I have never been so moved, so ...”

“... his initiative sapped by handouts from the state’, or the ‘young unmarried mothers’ Keith Joseph had fretted about in 1974, threatening ‘the balance of our population, our human stock’?‘Neither Keynesianism nor monetarism win votes in the electoral marketplace,’ Hall went on. But Thatcherism had ‘found a powerful means of popularising the ...”

“... Machiavelli, Vico, Herder, Pluralism, Romanticism, Utopianism. Even the longest piece, on Joseph de Maistre, is the enlargement of a portrait already sketched in an earlier comparison with Tolstoy. In a sense, however, this is the interest of the collection: it serves to bring the unity of Berlin’s thought sharply into focus. A philosopher by ...”

“... and was institutionalised. In 1911, Felix Mottl collapsed and died while conducting Tristan and Joseph Keilberth met the same end in 1968.We enjoy the stories about Tristan und Isolde because they indulge our wish to find in Wagner someone prodigious, to see him as a Faustian genius who gave two fingers to the god Terminus. We know, of course, that Ludwig ...”

“... of control were central to the Leave campaign, but they were not peddled only by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. They were also indulged in by voters grown unused to power and reckless with responsibility: one member of my family told me that she voted out to ‘kick the banks’, another that she wanted to take ‘Merkel down a notch’. The​ governing ...”

“... equality of opportunity are based.But what is a ‘genuine sense’ of meritocracy? When, in 1958, Michael Young put the term into general circulation with the publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy (he did not, as is often assumed, coin the term), the suffix pointed to an analogy with democracy or aristocracy as forms of rule or government. It suggested ...”

“... at once necessary and futile, logical and horrifying. L’Armée des ombres was based on Joseph Kessel’s novel, which Melville read in London in 1943 and considered ‘the most beautiful and complete document on this tragic period’. But it’s much more than an adaptation. The film has autobiographical touches, such as a sequence in London where ...”

“... stepped past the door of the Bateman Room, where Prynne invited visiting poets like George Oppen, Michael McClure and Dorn to read. He hosted convivial gatherings in his rooms afterwards.After that first meeting, there were book exchanges and valued responses in that precise and unwavering black hand. Brinton told me that these letters were crafted; there ...”