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“... 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 ...”

“... the meaningful non-statement is odd but, for the reader, it has a curiously addictive quality. As Michael Wood excellently put it, we repeatedly find ourselves asking ‘why we are smiling when there doesn’t seem to be anything to smile about’.Tóibín is not the first person to advance an interpretation of Mann as a virtuoso of life in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and all the more so after the loss of one of our Conservative members, the political scientist Michael Pinto-Duschinsky (who managed with admirable agility to jump in mid-air, having been pushed off the ledge by his own side). Even so, we all knew that our views ranged so far across the political spectrum that the chances of meaningful consensus were not ...”

“... style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their desks; It has been raining all day, and I found myself ...”

“... the biggest speculative bubble in history, neutral, interest-free globalisation. Ellen Meiksins Wood is guilty in her book of glossing over this interregnum and, even more extraordinarily, of paying scant regard to the Cold War: American behaviour and motivation can, for her, be charted as a straight line from the emergence of the US as the world’s ...”

“... of Austria-Hungary) and now has, in English, an almost entirely new oeuvre to the one James Wood wrote about here soon after he died (and I wrote about in the TLS).* For a dead foreign writer to be allowed to carry on in this way is, to say the least, rather unusual. At that time, Wood wrote about a great comic ...”

“... productions, and his beautiful settings of Ariel’s songs in The Tempest survive. The historian Michael Wood has ingeniously argued that the lyrics of ‘Woods, Rocks & Mountains’ are suggested by the wilderness setting of the Cardenio story and have some parallels with phrases in Shelton’s Quixote. He thinks the song was performed at the point in ...”

“... played, says Ditie, the uncle always puts on his old Habsburg uniform when he goes out to chop wood. This is not so far, in impulse, from Hanta, the narrator of Too Loud a Solitude, who longs to run around the track at Olympia in his long johns, fulfilling his dream of the Greek ideal of athleticism. What is moving about all these characters is the ...”

“... in hand sometimes caused her to lose perspective: she focused on the trees and did not notice the wood. The basic failure of the 1964-70 Labour Government lay in its inability to secure the economic growth it had promised. The National Plan, published in September 1965, was posited on a 25 per cent increase in national output between 1964 and 1970 – an ...”

“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”

“... went one better and procured the body, according to Macintyre, of a down and out Welshman, Glyndwr Michael, a 34-year-old vagrant found dead in January 1943 in an abandoned warehouse. Michael had either intentionally or mistakenly drunk a concoction called Battle’s Vermin Killer, which contained white phosphorus, a toxic ...”