“... attention has shifted to Alfred’s achievements, and those of his son Edward the Elder, with Michael Wood alone making the case for Æthelstan. Only in the last two decades has Æthelstan come to the fore again, with monographs by Sarah Foot, in 2011, and now by Woodman, which focus on his reign, assess his record and examine his legacy.England’s ...”

“... to other cases. Said’s book consists of lectures and other scattered pieces, deftly assembled by Michael Wood, and not all bearing directly on the topic, though it is always near at hand. The most surprising contribution is an essay on Richard Strauss, who certainly had spent a long life studying ‘the possibilities’. He set some well-known stylistic ...”

“... ladder Scraping the cherry tree – We find in Silvano’s Sloping upper meadow Close to the wood, regal Among seeding grasses, An orchid, each lower lip A streamer, extroversion Requiring subtle breezes, A name to silence cuckoo And frog, lizard orchid. II Did the muddy boots of Tommies Really bring back to England From the Great War lizard-orchid Seeds ...”

“... assumes a Hobbesian worldview: ‘Life is a warfare against the malice of others.’ Anticipating Michael Corleone, Serner offers a warning: ‘Get to know your enemies personally.’ But he leavens the advice too: ‘Often you’ll find they make the best companions.’Lesson four: self-control is key and your act is everything, but you need back-up if both ...”

“... movements of the hospice district.Irrelevance or irritation. Meals or wheels.The gaspy whistle of wood pigeons’ wingsand their little-brained Roo-coo-cooanaesthetises another summer.A bee taps against a pane.The draught crosses from the open picture windowto the open veranda door, ‘your papers, please.’Volunteers and a few veterans.All ...”

“... dogs no ball games) and the barranca, the sanction and the delimited amenity. Mindless wood-pigeons bleat like unanswered telephones. Nothing so douce as sandstone in a granite town, a town monstered by gulls and sunspots and unkempt dogs, softened in any case from when I lived here fifty years ago, when, taking my life in my hands, I walked to ...”

“... in and of itself – all too often ‘a gesture of admiring incomprehension’, to quote Michael Wood – is rather meaningless. Unfortunately, Walker can’t tell how, or at least he can’t tell me. (Rosen can and does.) He simply supplies Schopenhauer’s definition (the talented hit targets others can’t reach: the genius ‘hits a target ...”

“... is not outside the world he criticises, he is part of it, and so are his friends and family,’ Michael Wood wrote in the LRB of 7 September 2000: ‘Social arrangements are foolish and apparently fragile, because they are arbitrary and groundless. Everything about them could be different, and is different in other times and places … And yet it is ...”

“... and many legal theorists believe it is. A literate Martian, for example, would not believe that Michael Zander was writing about the same society as Paddy Hillyard and Janie Percy-Smith, and at the same period of time. There is simply no space in Zander’s world-picture for the possibility that ours is a coercive state or that democracy is in decline here ...”

“... for languages or football: because it’s beautiful. I have no idea what stars were rising when Michael Wood’s The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles pushed onto the planet’s surface, but so brainy a book must have a lot of air signs in its chart. It seems at first to have been born under the sign of ...”

“... by the market, still a fake? What does intention matter if your audience doesn’t care about it? Michael ‘Butcher’ Boone, one of the two narrators of Theft, is a once famous Australian artist, newly divorced and down on his luck. His work is now very unfashionable, and he has retreated to a rustic house in New South Wales owned by his patron. Here, ...”

“... Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their ...”

“... times it was thought that forested land tended to offer the most fertile agricultural soil. As Michael Williams carefully describes, for diverse cultures in diverse periods in history, deforestation has been intimately bound up with agricultural aspirations. But because trees impart a unique physical structure to the environment – only ...”

“... that it was factually correct. Clutching the galleys, I rang the bell at his house in St John’s Wood. Sir Thomas himself opened the door. He did not seem friendly. However, he allowed me into his drawing-room, though without offering me a chair, and himself sat down and began to read. Never before or since have I seen anyone so slowly and yet so inexorably ...”

“... many of the distinctive, and often contradictory, traits of the early Renaissance in Germany. Michael Baxandall’s excellent book continually reminds us that a school of this kind cannot be separated from the social context in which it flourished. It was an age of demographic growth and commercial expansion which saw the emergence of early capitalist ...”