“... stomach in Savernake Forest to line up a young mother in his gunsights (as the Hungerford killer Michael Ryan did in 1987). He is an ecologically minded clothing designer, who speaks of reclaiming camouflage rather as the community activists of 1968 (the year Blechman was born) used to talk about repossessing the town hall. As the founder and ...”

“... with their own positions – or lives – nor unconcerned for the fate of those they led. Michael Maurrus’s account of the Union Générale des Israélites Français in France is harder on the bureaucratic obtuseness that led the UGIF to provide the Gestapo with the names and addresses of Jewish children placed in homes and orphanages; he also ...”

“... detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher from the pen of John Vincent. As a final savoury, Tony Benn, Michael Fraser, David Marquand and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ‘The Road from 1945’. Addison takes issue with Corelli Barnett’s Audit of ...”

“... an early suffragist. She knew how to earn good money as a dressmaker and hen-keeper. Her husband Michael Cleary was an educated and literate cooper, whose services were much in demand by local businesses. He had served his apprenticeship in the progressive town of Clonmel and had good prospects. As a couple, they seemed the very image of a modernising ...”

“... side of Italian Fascism in the Thirties had no doubt that the Falangists were true Fascists. Michael Ledeen writes in Universal Fascism that ‘Spinetti argued that the Falange was a true Fascist movement because of its belief in the Fascist trinity of “authority, hierarchy, order”, and because of the Spanish “mysticism” which raised Falangist ...”

“... to be funny. I suppose otherwise they’d never laugh at all. In their biography The Real Romney, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman write that ‘within the family, Romney’s zany side was well known.’* They give two examples: Romney assuming ‘the voices of cartoon characters’ in letters home from Bordeaux, where he was a missionary in the late ...”

“... Mitt Romney has now joined Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale in the political void that awaits any rejected American presidential nominee who doesn’t care to linger into senatorial senescence. Dole appeared in adverts for Viagra. Dukakis has been a public transport activist. Mondale, in 2002, at the age of 74, ran an 11-day campaign for his old Minnesota Senate seat after Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash ...”

“... Marine’ because you’d fallen for this young priest he was a loiner Tim Ryan that’s a lie and driven with him July a heatwave all through the West the East Riding some harbour Hornsea Spurn Head it’s pathetic you were in cheesecloth he’d green shades I could scream still the Society of Jesus White Fathers it’s invisible as ...”

“... they fit in the professional family the singer – or, really, his mother – has constructed. Ryan Good, stylist, is ‘like the coolest older brother ever’; Carin Morris, wardrobe, is ‘like Justin’s big sister’ (she was also Braun’s long-term girlfriend, which makes the metaphor a bit yucky); Scrappy, stage manager, ‘kinda’ looks at Justin ...”

“... will culminate in an expertly targeted head-butt. Her mother’s swashbuckling new lover, Connor (Michael Fassbender), seems like a good thing, with his easy charm and his largesse; until, aroused by Mia’s pugnacity, he starts to groom her for sex. Like Katie in Red Road, she exacts a revenge as cunning as it is ferocious. But for her there will be no ...”

“... the offenders. This is the seriousness of the naming of Fred Goodwin in the House of Lords and Ryan Giggs in the House of Commons as claimants who had obtained injunctions forbidding their identification. It does not have to do with limiting free speech in Parliament: it has to do with the misuse of that undoubted historic freedom. It does not even depend ...”

“... Ryan Coogler’s​ horror movie Sinners is (so far) the pop cultural sensation of the second Trump administration. Elijah and Elias Moore, aka Smoke and Stack, twin brothers played by an alternately caddish and cantankerous Michael B. Jordan, return home to Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta in 1932 ...”

“... Weiner a rather bland politician: a striver and a party hack, another jockish pretty boy, a Paul Ryan of the centre left. In the 1980s, just out of college, where he played hockey (still does, every Monday night), Weiner rose through the office of then Congressman Charles Schumer (now known as ‘Wall Street’s senator’), and was elected New York’s ...”

“... transparent, had arrived at a point where most of their activity was secret and mysterious. Enter Michael Lewis. Flash Boys is a number of things, one of the most important being an exposition of exactly what is going on in the stock market; it’s a one-stop shop for an explanation of high-frequency trading (hereafter, HFT). The book reads like a ...”

“... I did care, filling exercise book after exercise book with star ratings and plot synopses for Meg Ryan romantic comedies, Disney cartoons, John Grisham adaptations, disaster movies and action thrillers, along with harder-breathing fare from the Dogme 95 group and Leos Carax’s Pola X, remorselessly grim and containing shots of what the censor called ...”