“... the meaningful non-statement is odd but, for the reader, it has a curiously addictive quality. As Michael Wood excellently put it, we repeatedly find ourselves asking ‘why we are smiling when there doesn’t seem to be anything to smile about’.Tóibín is not the first person to advance an interpretation of Mann as a virtuoso of life in the closet, and he ...”

“... to match the monumental character of the prose. Fruscione compares Hemingway’s biographer Michael Reynolds’s story of Ernie returning in 1919 to his high school in Oak Park to show off his blood-stained uniform to the children, with a ‘similar act of masculine self-aggrandisement’ on Faulkner’s part. This was steep, even by Hemingway standards ...”

“... after Salter had seen a script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Robert Redford. Solo Faces is the story of a rock-climbing drifter and his friend and rival and their pursuit of glory through heroic feats on the mountain. In the earlier A Sport and a Pastime, the quarry, the struggled for peak, is ...”

“... I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much more than simply ‘rhapsodise’ (to quote Frank Lentricchia). I analyse the man. I synthesise him. I provide what both Marxists and Freudians call ‘symptomatic readings’. But beyond that, beyond what all literary critics (including Lentricchia) are supposed to do, I – well, let me quote Winton ...”

“... and recognition for the clockmaker. The emotional tension of those chapters recalls Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas. It never feels quite right to be most attached to a writer’s most famous work. But there’s something private and swift about Longitude. The Glass Universe has a more dutiful energy to it. Sobel’s other books include Galileo’s Daughter ...”

“... backed the creation of a committee to investigate the CIA’s domestic spying, headed by Senator Frank Church. But the committee also came across evidence of the CIA coup in Chile, as well as the Kennedy brothers’ efforts to have Fidel Castro assassinated. Church, an aspiring presidential candidate and devotee of Camelot, chose not to look too closely into ...”

“... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...”

“... leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to English standards’. Frank Forsdick and his men asked for ‘a bit of old English roast beef or a plate of fish and chips’ and beer instead of wine. It didn’t require the commercial vapidities of the Greenwich Dome – a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such ...”

“... with volumes devoted to the American ‘empire’. But how appropriate is this evocative term? Michael Mann has been working for two decades as ‘a historical sociologist on the nature of power in human societies’. In this dense and lively volume, composed ‘at breakneck speed’, he analyses and evaluates the main strands of US global influence, with ...”

“... in a city that doesn’t sleep and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.’ The lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s standard ring out like a mocking chorus from the Yankee Stadium when the hometown wins. Poor Trump, who thought the song should be his anthem, could never shake his ‘little town blues’. His humiliation at his failure ‘to make it ...”

“... ends. Her tale of scholarly intrigue and Cold War defamation finds a useful counterpoint in Michael Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1979). In this account, Moby-Dick is not about what 20th-century scholars thought America should become, but about what it became in any case. Ishmael warns us against ‘scouting at ...”

“... campaign in 1945, and the abuse he received for it, even from young protégés like his beloved Michael Foot, was unnerving. His wartime colleague Clement Attlee called him ‘the man in public life who is most widely distrusted by decent men of all parties’. Beaverbrook’s career as a politician was over. With Labour in power, he had lost all his ...”

“... Broken Home’, written 32 years after ‘Looking at Mummy’: One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed Michael, the Irish setter, head Passionately lowered, led The child I was to a shut door. Inside, Blinds beat sun from the bed. The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise. Under a sheet, clad in taboos Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread, And of a ...”

“... and the Lille plan looked back to urban models (such as the Broadacre City concept of Frank Lloyd Wright) that also ‘imagined nothingness’. Perhaps Koolhaas sensed that the new economy of media and communications might not abet a further dissolution of the city, its final death, as architectural futurists such as Paul Virilio had forecast, but ...”

“... admissions practices hardly square with Labour’s policies of social inclusion. In a surprisingly frank statement to the House of Commons Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families in January, the education minister, Ed Balls, made it clear that it was ‘not the policy of the government . . . to promote more faith schools’. Communities, if they ...”