“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Online vaunted its association with two local celebrities: ‘Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em star Michael Crawford revealed he visited the pub during filming forty years ago. And German literary star Uwe Johnson also had his own stool at the pub where he used to write about the people he met.’ Photos of Crawford and Johnson accompanied a picture of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by training and profession, a philosopher by vocation, and an economist in his spare time, Frank Ramsey was blessed with an extraordinarily acute intelligence and an extremely likeable nature. Unfortunately for all those who knew him and for the intellectual history of the 20th century, he was also cursed with a chronic liver condition. He died in 1930 ...”

“... Perhaps the real test of an anthology is whether it convincingly brings fresh material forward. Michael Harper, Dave Smith, Albert Goldbarth: Vendler takes risks at the Contemporary end of her Book, and mostly carries them off. Though one looks in vain for Hass or Dulpen, there is much to please, including a clutch of decorously unfeminist women. Louise ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”