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“... explain what Hippomenes is doing in such a strange position. Reni was surely right to show Saint Michael and Samson in triumph rather than in combat: triumph is more easily reconciled with beauty. But Reni’s figures are beautiful because they are transfigured by heavenly grace, enraptured by some high ideal, or because it is essential to their pathos. The ...”

“... more than anyone else he acted out the strange mass subjectivity of the Pop image-world. As Michael Warner has argued, ‘to be public in the West means to have an iconicity . . . In the figures of Elvis, Liz, Michael, Oprah, Geraldo, Brando and the like, we witness and transact the bloating, slimming, wounding, and ...”

“... forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes. Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea is Niall Ferguson. Only an American empire, he insists, can secure order in a dangerous, unruly world. He does not ...”

“... of all Scots’, so there is some excuse for me. On the other hand most of us have heard of Michael Miliken, of whose Law-like career Buchan offers a vivid sketch. He could ‘create money with a single sentence’, his salary in 1986 was $550 million, which, on the Buchan-approved capitalisation model of Sir William Petty (20 times one’s annual ...”

“... Stafford Smith does not explicitly condemn the theorising of academics such as Alan Dershowitz or Michael Levin, but he implies that their rationalisations of torture may have helped to legitimate its use. Indeed, in urging his readers to link the armchair explanations of professors and policy-makers to the silence or racist abuse of soldiers and prison ...”

“... for his rudeness, but partly because he captured the essence of my other, still breathing hero, Michael Jordan. ‘Half dust, half deity’, Byron wrote of man’s estate, but I applied his meaning more specifically. ‘Alike unfit to sink or soar’ seemed to describe that hanging space, a few feet off the ground, in which Jordan lived. Jordan has presided ...”

“... is not the kind of research I ever imagined myself undertaking,’ the papyrologist Michael Sampson wrote at the end of a long discussion of the source of the Sappho papyrus, ‘and it’s not research that should have been necessary in the first place.’Even in the best of circumstances, a scholar who works with ancient Egyptian artefacts must ...”

“... are Iraq and Iran, both sources of uncertainty and threat. What strategies are available, Paul Michael Brannagan and Danyel Reiche ask in their useful overview of the politics of the 2022 World Cup, to such a small and vulnerable state when it attempts to achieve some measure of security and influence? Acquiring powerful allies and a military overlord is a ...”

“... looking for juicy yarns. This is why a racy, readable, gossipy book like The World’s Money by Michael Moffitt (himself an adviser to Shearson American Express, a subsidiary of one of the big lenders) is worth a whole stack of official reports, particularly to policy-makers, who have to deal constantly with markets but often have no idea of what they ...”

“... The only signs of fresh pictorial intelligence in the exhibition come from two Englishmen, John Michael Wright and John Riley, whose portraits presage the comic tones of the 18th century, and from the Flemish Jacob Huysmans. Huysmans, like Orazio Gentileschi before him, was a protégé of the queen whose waywardness could be indulged: his portrait of Queen ...”

“... City of God seems to have become the Left’s new paradigm of social change. In Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, Augustine provides the model for a counter-empire in which ‘the divine city is a universal city of aliens, coming together, co-operating, communicating.’ And even Slavoj Žižek, who complains that ‘in today’s critical and ...”

“... of the painting, the eye can wander about as it pleases. In a recent book on Mughal painting, Michael Rogers observed that ‘in many fine Islamic paintings, as indeed in the late Gothic manuscript painting of Northern Europe, it is left to the viewer to organise the space as he or she will, the eye roving from exquisite detail to exquisite detail without ...”

“... in the bureaucratic aftermath of the Jacksonian Revolution, or by Francis Coppola’s fratricidal Michael Corleone in the Cold War utopia of the Fifties, or by The Turner Diaries’ stone-faced Timothy McVeigh in 1995, just months after the United States began a shift from the republic of inclusion shaped by Lincoln, Carnegie, and King to the republic of ...”

“... is now the United States of America was not part of it in 1776, and would not be for many decades. Michael L. Trujillo writes that ‘the significance of the Oñate icon for many Oñate supporters may be found in Nuevomexicanos’ own subjugation to the most powerful of the three major ethnic/racial groups in New Mexico: Anglos.’ Which is to say that the ...”

“... and evaluating international markets.Even when their projects failed – Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe write that a McKinsey-led reorganisation of the NHS in 1974 was a ‘proliferation of paper’ and a bureaucratic mess – they were hired again and again by the British government to reduce employee numbers and institute unpopular ...”