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“... in custody. In all these cases there had been prior warnings of lax security. The Home Secretary, Michael Howard, commented obliquely and absurdly that current searching practice ‘exceeds required levels’. On 8 January three more prisoners escaped from Littlehey near Huntingdon. One was a rapist (a Category A offender) with Category C status, a fact which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... recently pointed out, was anticipated by several stories and poems, including one about an 800-foot liner called the Titan. Enzensberger’s poem turns the tables on all of this by imagining at one point that ‘there was no such a thing [sic] as the sinking of the Titanic’ and that A Night to Remember is now showing in the ship’s cinema. The poem’s ...”

“... necessary to consider his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of ...”

“... This month​ marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock festival. Michael Lang, the tenacious 24-year-old who made Woodstock happen, has a habit of surfacing at Woodstock birthdays: one book to mark the tenth anniversary, another to mark the fortieth, a couple of namesake concerts and now a coffee-table volume of photos from the 1969 festival, plus brief explanatory notes ...”

“... to an affection for humanity. This, if Diana Melly did happen to be on a spiritual quest (a foot soldier, say, on the Path of Blame), would be not just the honest, but the required reader-response. The strongest argument for such a reaction is that it is very difficult to react in any other way. Satisfying, too: we all need someone we can’t ...”

“... position by launching a final, overwhelming attack on the Allied armies in the West. Operation Michael, as it was named, deployed new and highly effective artillery tactics: enemy guns and command posts were targeted before a ‘creeping barrage’ that moved ahead of the advancing infantry was laid down, forcing the defenders to stay under cover until the ...”

“... Dickens, who held strong opinions about virtually everything, had his own view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as much ...”

“... and explaining the natural world, and religion to studying human purposes, meanings and values. Michael Ruse’s book is an astonishing contribution to this literature. It astonishes because of the bravado of its thesis. Instead of espousing Gould’s tame view that religion and science are distinct but complementary, Ruse, a philosopher and historian of ...”

“... effect in the original. Yes, it is conceivable. But what is there to guarantee it? We look to the foot of the page and note that the translator is the poet himself. Given some of the ingenious and pleasing English rhymes (‘warty’ with ‘forty’) and near-rhymes (‘transparence’ with ‘larynx’), we should be churlish to begrudge all applause. The ...”

“... More often, though, they end up forgetting what it was that made them average – no left foot, slow on the turn, weak in the air – and forgetting, too, the safety ploys they had developed in order to disguise their averageness. And this can make for some weird and wonderful defensive cock-ups. Still, who would rather be watching Leeds United? For ...”

“... is looser in style and the tone is now more personal, there is a lingering coolness. Like Michael Hofmann, Greenlaw has a fondness for paired, unexpected adjectives delivered in a clipped prose-like manner: ‘This privacy is teenage,/collective’; ‘The hill has its nightlife, amiable, averted’. Rather like the quasi-journalistic ethos of ...”

“... Mazzetti, then a student at the Slade, made a film called Together, with her fellow artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi playing the main parts. She shot it in the bombed-out East End, which gaggles of children had made their territory; her camera catches the wild scrambling, dash and hurtle of scores of boys and girls playing together in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Manet’s earlier responses to her presence – cornered him into a frantic attack on his two-foot-high canvas, stabs and swipes of black pelting down on two other mainstays of his palette, a bright flesh tint and a cow-dung brown. Everything became ragged, snatched, hollow. MaryAnne Stevens, the curator, wants to take Manet on via the genre of the ...”