“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... And then, to go on in a slighdy different vein, doesn’t Goldsmith’s = CalArts and doesn’t Michael Craig Martin = Michael Asher, and therefore isn’t it only to be expected that Sensation = Helter Skelter and/or Scene of the Crime, to cite the two definitive exhibitions of new Los Angeles art. This is not to say ...”

“... to the newspapers attacked the influx of Jews, others also came to their defence, most notably Michael Davitt, the leader of the Land League. ‘The Jews have never to my knowledge done any injury to Ireland,’ he wrote in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal in 1893. ‘Like our own race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... back. The sequence – you do need the whole sequence – is typical of Trump. He can’t walk a straight line, even on a pattern he has rehearsed, without a ballet step in the middle that strikes him as clever in the moment. Thus he undermines the presentation; and something else has to be tried in a hurry. Trump won election to the highest office in the US ...”

“... removed the unpredictable human factor.Iwas hired​ by the Houston office of Andersen Consulting straight out of an engineering undergraduate degree in 1991. Every spring, the consulting firms arrived on campuses and scooped up imminent graduates with good grade point averages. They hired everybody from engineers to English majors, though those with a ...”