“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I could have had more), from Eshleman, from H.R. Hays, from Ed Dorn and Gordon Brotherston, from Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi, from Margaret Sayers Peden and now from Margaret Jull Costa. None is the English Vallejo. What frustrates their enterprise is an inability to decide what matters and what doesn’t. They end up not seeing 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 ...”

“... annual Mid-Century Modern fair celebrated its 21st anniversary in Christison Hall, a light, airy, wood and concrete ceremonial space in the grounds of Dulwich College. Here you could shop for Panton, Knoll or Eames chairs, World Expo posters or fabrics by Lucienne Day, and leaf through a range of zines, maps and books, while the building around you radiated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the valley below the station, is one of the best and most original of all Victorian churches. St Michael and All Angels is almost as impressive. It has a complicated building history: Bodley was responsible for the first church of 1858, Burges designed the additions which were completed by 1893. Its high, black and red brick walls frown darkly on the ...”

“... and fell into the middle of the room with me underneath it. I knew the face framed by that rickety wood. I’d seen it before, in that frame, and I knew who it was: my grandfather Michael. I knew that’s who it was though I’d never met him. The grandfather was covered in dust and damp patches dried in. But that was ...”

“... A memory of the retreat from Moscow, or some fresh threat or promise? Some German Birnam Wood? The barrettes (think Wagner) and velvety tunics of some of his humans – you would have to call them deuteragonists – were actually elements of a (forbidden) neo-medieval uniform indicating liberal political opposition, the one that lost to ...”