“... wrong time: ‘Naples too, as indeed everything Italian, is more beautiful in the summer.’ His barber warns him of an impending change of weather: ‘Pioggia, scirocco, eh –’ He haunts the museum, takes refuge in the book he has brought with him from Munich, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. In his dedication to the first volume of New Poems, he writes ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”

“... smell.’Unfamiliar odours, by contrast, were (and are) greeted with suspicion. In 1657 a London barber was prosecuted for making and selling ‘a liquor called “coffee”’, to the ‘great nuisance and prejudice of the neighbourhood’. Yet it did not take long for people to regard the smell of coffee as even better than the taste. Meanwhile, unpleasant ...”

“... movement, an idea associated with American chefs including Alice Waters and Dan Barber and food writers such as Michael Pollan. ‘I got stuck on the conjunction,’ Twilley writes. ‘What about the to?’ The farm-to-tablers drew attention to the disconnect between eaters and farmers. Twilley’s ...”

“... moustaches. Schreiner’s husband, Samuel Cronwright, had found the photograph in the window of a barber shop in Kimberley, the diamond-mining town in the north of the Cape Colony. It had been taken in Southern Rhodesia during the recent Ndebele rebellion against the British South Africa Company, when panicked settlers had laagered in Bulawayo and lynched ...”

“... type of paper had caught on, which happened in the 1860s or thereabouts (when, we might gather, a barber had difficulty in distinguishing between his clients and his dinner). However tempting it is to view such material from the standpoint of the present – a practice geared to the arousal of merriment – Drotner believes it’s wrong to extract it from the ...”

“... not register on the watchdogs’ computer screens. Despite this, in May, the CIA director, Michael Hayden, claimed that al-Qaida had suffered a ‘near-strategic defeat’. And the British government’s National Security Strategy, released in March, concluded that terrorism ‘does not at present amount to a strategic threat’. Those confident ...”

“... born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had ...”

“... In a gloss on the snot riddle in his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Michael Thompson explains that the riddle succeeds by playing upon that which is residual to our system of cultural categories. When, in the context of wealth and poverty, we talk of possessable objects we unquestioningly assume that we are talking about ...”

“... are often in the middle of the day and at lunchtime today it’s The Stars Look Down (1939) with Michael Redgrave, which I would have seen in 1940 in one of Armley’s half a dozen picture houses. Like How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green (1945), it’s the story of a working-class boy bettering himself through education ...”

“... him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made in connection with a fountain group for an aristocrat’s garden, is another. Above all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 by a ...”

“... status, and brought him a useful contact with the chairman, Heath’s ex-Chancellor, Lord Barber of Boom. After Major’s decisive political advancement to the post of Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1987, Mrs Thatcher used to lament: ‘No one told me he’d only been in marketing at Standard Bank.’ If it was characteristic of her to distribute ...”

“... Clegg’s synthesis of social with market liberalism makes no advance on the position taken by Michael Portillo when he launched his bid for the Conservative leadership nearly a decade ago, while Cameron’s much touted ‘big society’ is a recycled version of the civic conservatism advocated by David Willetts in the early 1990s. These were attempts to ...”

“... vitae assembled by van Onselen lists the following accomplishments: ‘arsonist, bank robber, barber, bigamist, brothel-owner, burglar, confidence trickster, detective’s agent, gangster, horse-trader, hotelier, informer, jewel thief, merchant, pickpocket, pimp, policeman, rapist, restaurateur, safe-cracker, smuggler, sodomist, special ...”

“... conservative Congressmen and Senators – including Robert Michel, the Republican Minority Leader, Barber Conable (now head of the World Bank) and Jesse Helms. The real high point came, however, when President Nixon, warmed by the Moonies’ unconditional support for him during Watergate, invited Moon to the White House, where the two men prayed ...”