“... a writer whose similarity to Vonnegut, and known influence on him, is possibly less flattering: George Bernard Shaw. Critics of Vonnegut have sometimes remarked with some justice on the haziness or orthodoxy of what appear to be uncompromised and uncompromising declarations of belief by him. In these moments one can see why Vonnegut enjoys so greatly the ...”

“... shall be gradually prepared to admit their real existence among us.’ But others, including George Washington and John Adams, already regarded the unconfined soul of Shakespeare as belonging more securely to the land of the free than to the land of his birth, and the first American edition of the Complete Works – a piracy of an English text, but with ...”

“... eyes rise up before me … yes, these tired eyes, athirst for death.In Young Rilke and His Time, George Schoolfeld calls this woman ‘an advance member of [Rilke’s] rich gallery of women variously beset’. The recast piece is called ‘Fantasy’ and subtitled ‘a poem in prose’. Enough already.The second ‘Emigrant-Ship (Naples)’ is both immediate ...”

“... victories, are themselves uncertain about how to end it. What will there be to pick up when George Bush leaves office in two years’ time? If he lasts that long.Conclusions and opinions aren’t Woodward’s strongest suit. He offers no general summations to his three books, no views on the people he interviews. He allows his subjects to speak for ...”

“... taste of his own, Haitink became the victim of those who had to decide things for him. In Michael Waldman’s unsparing television documentary The House, the hapless Haitink is seen to be flabbergasted as the head of the opera company, Nicholas Payne, tries to sell him the director Richard Jones’s scheme for the Ring. In Die Walküre Fricka would ...”

“... on for advice, and when he arrived at the grotto he received a visitation from the Archangel Michael, who ordered him to consecrate a Christian altar on the site. It’s not known what happened to the man with the arrow in his forehead, but the result of his misadventure was the famous Santuario di San Michele. In 999 AD, the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto ...”

“... active and gentlemanly-looking; his age is about 30 years.’ Such was the picture of the young Michael Davitt, Fenian suspect, produced by the police detective who was watching him in 1869. (In fact, he was working-class, and 24 years old.) Somewhat later, after seven years’ penal servitude, he was seen by the Irish Parliamentarian F.H.O’Donnell as ...”

“... loves. He is a superb praiser, so it is a pity that he should ever be driven beyond his patience. Michael Hamburger’s poems have always been in the shadows of his translations and critical essays: mainly, I think, because he has acute misgivings about the autonomy of language. He believes in inspiration, that a poet’s words are what ‘some power behind ...”

“... in a Sunday newspaper in two days’ time. How can I not be manic? The next day I met the poet Michael Horowitz in the local health-food shop. The last time I bumped into him, in the same place a few months before, I was about to deliver my completed manuscript. Today, I asked him to my launch party. ‘Maybe I could review your book,’ he said. ‘That ...”

“... idea of a modern politician turning down such a soundbite opportunity makes one sigh. Similarly, Michael Jago reproduces part of an interview with Honor Balfour in 1967: Balfour: What was the greatest achievement of the Labour government? Attlee: Indian independence. Balfour: What was the greatest problem you faced? Attlee: Russia. Balfour: What was the ...”

“... obscurity begins with Nietzsche, who, cried up along with Pindar himself and Hölderlin by Stefan George and friends in their war for a Hellenised German (or Germanised Greek) Geist against Wilamowitzian philology, twists an adjuration from the Second Pythian, genoi’ hoios essi mathôn, ‘having learned [from me] what manner of man you are, live up to ...”

“... was accompanied by a widespread fascination with ‘Gypsies’ in popular culture. Klaus-Michael Bogdal, a professor of German literature at the University of Bielefeld at the time of the riots, was struck by the contradiction. In the early 1990s, Germans were taking up flamenco lessons. The French-Gitano band Gipsy Kings was hitting the top of the ...”

“... of particular places’. The exhibition includes several such pictures, watercolours by Sandby, Michael Angelo Rooker and others, beautiful but somehow small-minded, limited in their ambition, we are invited to believe. Eventually, however, in the early 19th century, topographical art was transcended by something infinitely more serious and more powerful, a ...”

“... where Christians have a huge impact on public policy’ – presumably, therefore, God agrees with George Bush’s tearing up of the Kyoto Protocol and is in favour of bespattering Alaska with oil wells. Furthermore, according to Mr Leach, EU integration runs ‘counter to a Biblical model’, for apparently ‘Biblical government is minimal ...”

“... arresting Rodney King, a black man, Unsworth won half the Booker Prize – the other half went to Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient – for a novel that in its unsparing portrayal of life aboard an 18th-century slave ship looked back to the colonial and commercial origins of racial tensions in North America. With its description of a multicultural ...”