“... superstate, and ‘the people’ is plastered across almost every Euro-story. In February, Michael Portillo was praised for reminding Chancellor Kohl that the nation state was far from a thing of the past: ‘OUR nation is very important to the people of the United Kingdom. We’ve given away enough to Europe already.’ Kohl is ‘just interested in ...”

“... hard stuff, of course, is a different matter. Uncollected in the Faber anthology is a moment in Michael Wharton’s ‘Peter Simple’ memoir when one of the more heroic Fleet Street pub-performers kept a long-postponed appointment with his doctor. After tapping and humming away, the quack inquired mildly; ‘D’you drink at all?’ Well-primed for the ...”

“... much more familiar to the modern academic than ‘guns and sails’. Bert Hall by contrast plunges straight into the unfamiliar world of Early Modern technology, the ‘black box’ as he calls it, whose inputs and outputs are commonly known to historians but whose inner functions are felt to be of no interest. Historians of technology (a small group) are ...”

“... indexes of their own books into distinct satires, long series of mocking entries presented with a straight face. Bentley’s qualities, for instance, included ‘egregious dulness … Pedantry … familiar acquaintance with Books that he never saw’. No one did this sort of thing more skilfully than Pope. The index to his magnificent parody of the scholarly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... political edge could be tolerated: anyone who showed any sign of that kind of talent was, like Michael Heseltine, bound to come to grief. By 1987, when the Leaderene had won her third straight election, the Cabinet was stacked with rabbits, nerds and characters with sufficiently low testosterone levels to endure repeated ...”

“... led to his release by a band of soldiers in the civil wars; that he likes to open his bowels straight after he gets out of bed; that he prefers fish to meat; that he has a small penis; that an entrepreneurial valet stole some pages of his Essays. And we meet and grow familiar with a cast of real and semi-fictionalised characters: Montaigne’s great dead ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as I’ve ever come across in the movies. But no one has ever been as repeatedly and consistently sinister, morally ...”

“... her to maintain her sanity while under house arrest. While she was at Oxford, she met her husband, Michael Aris. She was not an outstanding student, Wintle finds: ‘the moralist in Suu Kyi tended . . . towards assertion of what she instinctively knew,’ rather than argument and exposition. In the 1970s and 1980s she followed her husband as he built his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... irascible natural philosopher Robert Hooke, had the idea that orbiting bodies tended to move in straight lines while at the same time being pulled towards some force-centre. Only Newton fully exploited its implications. He defined forces by the changes they produced in the motions of bodies on which they acted, then invented the term ‘centripetal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”