“... and writes villanelles, triolets and ballades: this may be in part a defensive strategy, as her ‘straight’ poems, including the sadly inevitable lines on an old photograph, are much less capable, and can be merely sentimental. Duncan Forbes also has some light and comical poems, ‘Fatso and Spotty’ and ‘Politics of Envy’ (about the ‘Jackdaw folder ...”

“... Dr Bennett’s essay was not merely a manifesto for Church conservatives: it also amounted to a straight allegation of a liberal conspiracy – a conspiracy, moreover, touching directly on the responsibilities of one of the commissioning editors (Mr Derek Pattinson). For the central point of Dr Bennett’s argument – predictably almost totally disregarded ...”

“... Hawthorne. No circle in the South could match that intellectual array. Nevertheless, along with Michael O’Brien, Genovese has successfully revived interest in Southern antebellum thinkers whose obscurity, they claim, is unmerited. The Southern Tradition reaffirms his long-standing devotion to the pro-slavery thinkers but takes still greater delight in ...”

“... happy warrior of Volume One. To mark the difference of tone, or perhaps out of mere incompetence, Michael Joseph have arranged matters so that the two volumes don’t match, whether in dust jackets or out of them: clashing cloths, misaligned lettering, ill-assorted portraits. Only face up and side by side do they make a pair, as though the publisher ...”

“... which is precluded by the structure of a whole situation has lost its grip on history. Michael Burleigh is surely on firm ground, however, in wondering whether Hitler could have defeated the Soviet Union – a nightmare possibility of a Nazi-dominated Europe, but not one, as he shows, that can be dismissed as fantasy. Jonathan Haslam, arguing about ...”

“... which challenges the assumption, shared by Greenberg, Clark, and Greenberg’s one-time protégé Michael Fried, that modern art is valuable as a defence and expression of the imagination; and Caroline Jones’s Eyesight Alone, in which she reads Greenberg against himself to show that his idea of a purely visual art hooks into modernity’s increasingly ...”

“... approach of pop historians such as William Shirer and T.L. Jarman, who were inclined to draw straight lines from Arminius of the Teutoburg Forest, to Luther, Hegel, Nietzsche and on to Hitler. Gay, along with other German émigré historians, such as George Mosse and Fritz Stern, helped change all that by pointing to the variegated hue and social ...”

“... make it tremendously intriguing. This new edition, introduced and heavily annotated by Michael Franklin, should be welcomed by both literary scholars and historians. A 1908 reprinting gave Hartly House the very apt subtitle ‘A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings’. When the book originally appeared in 1789, Hastings’s defence team was busily ...”

“... this case of the French Ambassador’s secretary, Des Trappes. Also involved in this sham plot was Michael Moody, a former servant of Sir Edward Stafford’s in France and from the late 1580s an associate of Robert Poley, the veteran spy who was one of the men present at Marlowe’s death in Deptford. The early career of Thomas Drury seems to show us a young ...”

“... of Bob Hope, from the folk figure of Kiepenkerl (a travelling pedlar in medieval Germany) to Michael Jackson and his pet chimp Bubbles, showed a canny sense of the capaciousness of kitsch. But the social unease produced by a conscious display of bad taste wasn’t at all the point for Koons, who, in Warholian fashion, insisted on the sincerity of his ...”

“... access to Eilis’s thoughts. The great virtue of free indirect style is immediacy; it dips us straight into a character’s mind, making their experience more vital and direct. But this is why Tóibín prefers to avoid it. What the sometimes fastidious syntax tells us is that his focus is not on the incidents themselves but on Eilis’s response. ‘It ...”

“... it in economy is infra dig: ‘It’s not the food, it’s the sort of people.’ Another Tory, Michael Mates, spells it out: ‘He doesn’t want to meet his constituents.’ Coverage of Mullin during the expenses hoo-ha dwelt on his black-and-white telly, when other members were blagging plasma screens the size of Wales. Indeed, he voted last year with ...”

“... struck back. In Ridley Scott’s Black Rain (1989), two New York City cops, maverick Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas) and happy-go-lucky (i.e. obviously doomed) Charlie Vincent (Andy Garcia) escort a Japanese gangster by the name of Sato (Yusaku Matsuda) back to Osaka to face charges. They manage to lose him at Osaka airport, and thereafter have a hard time ...”

“... in a hot railway carriage opposite the insensate and sexy Dora captures an adolescent mixture of straight desire and a desire to please that vindicates her statement: ‘How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change.’ Murdoch’s ...”

“... she couldn’t get up without me. I helped her in the shower, singing bad renditions of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Wham! songs when she got flustered with drying herself and putting on face cream and brushing her teeth and pulling up her tights. (Approximate versions of 1980s pop aren’t prescribed for Alzheimer’s, but music very much is.) I found new ...”