“... the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Afterwards, in 1887, he persuaded the police to use their powers under this Act to close brothels in Tower Hamlets. In the words of Charrington’s admiring biographer, ‘our “Valiant-for-Good” began a furious, God-inspired onslaught upon the dens of East London, which actually resulted in the closing of 200 ...”

“... a live broadcast from a haunted house somewhere in London, with well-known presenters linking to Michael Parkinson in the studio, it was in fact a scripted recording; the reports from the house, interrupted by invented telephone calls from ‘concerned viewers’, degenerated into contrived havoc, and were ended by evil forces invading the studio, and ...”

“... in the confines of oil on canvas, delighting in procedure, hiding there from principalities and powers. Wildly different as the two men were temperamentally, their art shares an expository tone. They are both concerned to spell out the true nature and proper province of their craft. Therefore the impossible question ‘What is painting?’ tends to occur in ...”

“... painted in the same year that Damien Hirst organised the Freeze exhibition and Jeff Koons created Michael Jackson and Bubbles – the year that Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe.For Richter, the seeming inevitability of capitalism only made it a better subject. He has never been an artist who asks questions of the world ...”

“... stories he told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the ...”

“... it. The deposition of Richard II was a sensitive subject. In 1599, and again in 1600, the poet Michael Drayton, in preparing fresh editions of his England’s Heroical Epistles, cautiously excised lines bearing on Richard’s uncrowning and Henry’s usurpation. The edginess surrounding the topic was largely caused by a tract of 1593-94, A Conference about ...”

“... Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of ...”

“... the 1993 Prize, an actual dispute about contemporary art was staged at the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each ...”

“... however. Steve Hilton, his friend and chief strategist, is an enthusiast for the transformative powers of capitalism rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an ...”

“... partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the ...”

“... sure.15 January. Alan Rickman dies. In the first week of The Habit of Art at the National in 2009 Michael Gambon, playing Auden, was taken ill and rushed to St Thomas’s. He recovered quite quickly, and indeed got out of the ambulance saying: ‘I know what they’re all doing now – sitting up in the canteen recasting.’ Which indeed we were, with my ...”

“... imminent 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, described by the then head of the Commonwealth Office, Michael Purcell, as ‘a complete botch and a really classic piece of Home Office sophistry’. Free entry was now restricted to those who had been born or naturalised in Britain, or had a parent or grandparent with that qualification. The act violated provisions ...”

“... editors and academics.The government’s ‘Levelling Up’ white paper – masterminded by Michael Gove and released in February – gave these people something to chew on. It is full of rhetorical ambition: ‘system change is not about a string of shiny, but ultimately shortlived, new policy initiatives. It is about root and branch reform of ...”

“... hurricanes, That waste yourselves upon the unvexed rock, Find some employment proper to your powers. ‘Always the following wind of history/Of others’ wisdom makes a buoyant air,’ Nower observes at one point. To step outside such sonorous patriarchal discourses is to come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seem ...”

“... the Americans. In order to appeal to public opinion as well as to the governments of the Great Powers, the Zionists cultivated an image of reasonableness and moderation. Their tactics were always flexible even if their long-term aim was not. They tended to say yes rather than no to proposals by third parties even when they had serious reservations about ...”