“... ministers, amongst whom Brown challenged the Education Minister directly.     Brown: I want a straight answer to a straight question. If you had to choose between these 400,000 15-year-olds and university students, which would you help?     Gordon-Walker: If I had to make such a choice I suppose I’d help ...”

“... of these themes, without actually expanding them very much. Yet here we have Burke presented as a straight, unambiguous Tory; either the adamant foe of Jefferson or the moaning defender of Marie Antoinette. This is a real and sad declension. One of the signal achievements of the French Revolution was the abolition of slavery, and one of the horrors of ...”

“... by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of its plural structure, the department had gained and kept its reputation as a producer-led, oppositional space, not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s ...”

“... as a collector is merely a hoarder who has space for his stuff). This is one of the reasons Michael Landy’s Break Down (2001), the artwork in which he systematically destroyed all his possessions – including his passport, his birth certificate and his father’s sheepskin coat – in a shop window on Oxford Street, was so provocative. It felt not ...”

“... treatment of persons. Among its heroes are Isaiah Berlin and, with a good deal of qualification, Michael Oakeshott; on the Left there is the author’s contemporary Eric Hobsbawm. Others’ heroes – Raymond Williams, for instance – are sometimes harshly dismissed (‘a nonconformist spellbinder, rhetorical, evasive and vacuous’). These judgments are ...”

“... Carson, McGuckian ... the list goes on. Perhaps the most singular omission, though, is that of Michael Longley, whose Poems 1963-83, issued last year by the Salamander Press, shows a poet of incomparable fluency and discernment. When it comes to the Heaney selection (five poems), Kinsella has been rather unenterprising: nothing at all from Station ...”

“... Roy Jenkins wins and history is made Or if not made at least it’s modified. The dingbats straight away are on parade With Benn at his most foam-flecked and pop-eyed, Saying the gains the SDP has made All clearly point to a retreating tide. Thus King Canute spake as his feet got wetter, But further up the beach his court knew better. But now a ...”

“... in Inchigeela but in Literature. Specifically, the encounter with the dark woman seemed to come straight from Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen, the loneliness, the desire, and I was not surprised to find the story ending with a poem in eight lyric stanzas and a word from Yeats: ‘The dawn moved along the rim of the mountains and as I went down’ the hill ...”

“... in different fashion by Germanic poets and Roman writers. His father, having heard the paper, went straight home and wrote as follows: I suddenly realised that I am a pure philologist. I like history, and am moved by it, but its finest moments for me are those in which it throws light on words and names! ... I find the thing that really thrills my nerves is ...”

“... taught her first course in gay and lesbian studies to undergraduates at Amherst College and met Michael Lynch, a Canadian critic and gay activist with Aids, who introduced her to ‘the scene of gay men’s bonding . . . which at the experiential level was almost totally unknown to me’. In her next book, Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick wrote more ...”

“... player and coach Alex Murphy: ‘“You don’t bring that player off,” and then he looked me straight in the eyes and said, “unless he’s ——ing dead.”’ And then he pushed me onto the field.’ In 2009, it was discovered that at a game between Harlequins and Leinster, the Harlequins’ physio, attending a player on the field, slipped him a fake ...”

“... city, Manchester was notoriously overcrowded, jerrybuilt and grey. The ‘poor quality of straight life’, as Haslam drily puts it, gave a ‘mania’ to the population’s efforts at escape. Drinking was already a notorious local pastime – the beer was safer than the water – but the sheer density and novelty of the 19th-century city generated ...”

“... volume provides a graphic illustration of the point. ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’: Immanuel Kant dixit. By dint of repetition – the statement is cited once in Russian Thinkers, twice in Against the Current, three times in Four Essays on Liberty, and twice more in The Crooked Timber itself – Berlin has ...”

“... 1960 in Art and Illusion, and a similar equipoise was subsequently maintained in the writings of Michael Baxandall. But how long can you keep a department running by reference to a certain tone of voice? A greater security for its onward operation, a sounder status in academic bargaining, seemed promised by the panoramic critiques of authorship that were ...”

“... happened in France – they ran out of gas.’ The excellent American food and wine writer Michael Steinberger now follows Gopnik and the New York Times, concerned that haute cuisine has gone to pot. The disappointment is clear; its cause is not so clear. Is the problem that French cooking is not what it was, or that it is? In Casablanca, Bogie ...”