“... position where I can consummate the ordeal by the further ordeal of writing it.’ He never did. Michael Hofmann’s The Voyage That Never Ends is not Malcolm Lowry’s, but it puts us as close as anything can to being in a position to assess whether Lowry’s ‘Life Work’, unconsummated and fragmentary as it is, really does have the unity he claimed for ...”

“... activist whose convictions had a deep influence on Frank, her oldest son. He had three siblings, Michael, Bridget and Margaret; Michael went on to become a notably progressive archbishop of Canterbury. Frank’s brilliance was evident from the start. He taught himself to read almost as soon as he could talk and won a ...”

“... in – or, more precisely, of an attitude to life that they embodied. The book that the journalist Michael Owen wrote about the Winshaws in What a Carve Up! is given as a present to Rachel, who is told that it will help her understand the forces that shaped the country now being ravaged by austerity. The novel’s second section concentrates on Rachel’s ...”

“... English archers mowing down French cavaliers and Scottish spearmen, total victory, the Black Prince winning his spurs and, by the end of the year, both John II of France and David II of Scotland safely locked up in the Tower of London awaiting ransom. Mission accomplished. Except it wasn’t. Sumption takes us on through the chevauchées – the ...”

“... One of​ the great paradoxes of the Obama era is that it encouraged so many liberals, both black and white, to see the black experience in America not as a slow, arduous struggle for freedom culminating in the election of a black president – Obama’s version, not surprisingly – but as an unending nightmare ...”

“... years ago J.M. Wallace-Hadrill’s classic textbook on barbarian Europe warned against the ‘black untruth’ of claiming a fundamental opposition between kings and their aristocracy. On Charlemagne’s grandson Dr McKitterick writes: ‘Whereas the lay aristocracy was divided in its loyalty to Charles the Bald, the bishops and the church backed him ...”

“... through the advantages of ‘torture-lite’ in a cover story. In the New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff, biographer of Isaiah Berlin and professor of human rights, exhorted Americans to embrace their imperial destiny and offered his own suggestions for ‘permissible duress’. Even the New Yorker, fastidiously aloof from Beltway schemers during ...”

“... him a sizable audience. The Nightfisherman, a selection of Graham’s letters by his friends Michael and Margaret Snow, with 19 poems, photographs, drawings and his essay ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’, is the most useful and revealing book on the poet yet published and sets out the clearest record of his life. Graham was born into a blue-collar ...”

“... career. Since his retirement from the Civil Service, publications have come more frequently. Michael Schmidt, his colleague on PN Review, has promoted his work; and Donald Davie, in one of those hot flushes that make his criticism so unpredictable and exciting, has declared Sisson’s ‘The Usk’ to be ‘one of the great poems of our ...”

“... together, ‘peeling off the kilometres to the tune of “Blue Skies”, sizzling down the long black liquid reaches of National Sept, the plane trees going sha-sha-sha through the open windows’. The writing is genuinely alive with what Connolly called ‘erotic nostalgia’. Both Powell and Michael Shelden emphasise ...”

“... was – and what sort of artist produced it – was considerably less clear-cut (less black and white) than the graphics it used. Perhaps the most instructive attempt to set out shared principles was drawn up in 1969 by the American artist Sol LeWitt. As befits the idiom current at that moment, the artist’s chosen format was a list of 35 ...”

“... If an employer​ has a policy or practice of never promoting black or female or Muslim employees, it doesn’t require much legal theory to recognise this as direct racial or sexual or religious discrimination. Nor does it require a great deal of sophistication to recognise that an employer who makes promotion dependent on a test – literacy perhaps – which is applied to all candidates but which a substantially higher proportion of native-born than immigrant employees can pass is indirectly discriminating against the latter ...”

“... has the ‘Kremlin complexion’ from never leaving his office; his teeth are ‘black and irregular, turned inward’; ‘not even his moustache was thick or firm.’ But the magnetism remains. The Spanish Republicans had to pay gold bullion for Soviet weapons, but Stalin laughs off the idea of the Yugoslavs paying back any loans: ‘You are ...”

“... its Free Statehood: on 2 December 1921 he crossed the Irish Sea from Holyhead on the Cambria – Michael Collins and Erskine Childers, on their way back from the Treaty negotiations in London, were making the same journey. The Cambria collided with a schooner (killing three men) and when Ford arrived in Galway he discovered his ancestral home was in ...”

“... the blood of all his descendants with mysterious properties, so that in 1883 William George Black recorded that Dubliners regarded Keogh blood as a proven remedy for the toothache, while an acquaintance claimed to know of a Belfast Keogh ‘whose flesh had actually been punctured scores of times to procure his blood’. ...”