“... more powerful. By vesting a billionaire with extraordinary power, therefore, the voters are going straight to the relevant authority and cutting out the middle man – the politician. Trump unquestionably shares this perception with the people who voted for him. In a radio interview in 2015, he recalled his visit to Russia in 2013, in an unsuccessful attempt ...”

“... especially in America, where Israeli propaganda seems to lead a life of its own. Whereas, in 1975, Michael Adams and Christopher Mayhew were able to write about a coherent but unstated policy of unofficial British press censorship, according to which unpleasant truths about Zionism were systematically suppressed, the situation is not nearly as obvious so far ...”

“... produced’. In an essay called ‘Mythical Work’, one of Joyce’s collaborators, Michael Sonenscher, looks at the compagnonnages of 18th-century France. Journeymen in various trades practised a non-Christian ceremony of initiation into a devoir. The men concerned had overlapping skills concerned with building, furniture, leather. ‘The ...”

“... he said! ‘W.B. Yeats.’ And added: ‘I’m a poet.’ If he had said his name was Michael and declared himself to be an archangel it could not have had a more catastrophic effect upon me. ‘What?’ I exclaimed, ‘Yeats! The Irish poet! My God – well, my God … well … Yeats … well …’ Then I suddenly heard the ghastly sound of my ...”

“... by making an interest payment he wouldn’t otherwise have had the liquid reserves to meet. A straight loan would have put Fred Trump in the lengthy queue of creditors. With his loan in the form of chips he could redeem it as soon as his son had the capital. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission ruled a year later that Fred Trump had engaged in an ...”

“... to this London post-punk scene of an international idea of what an avant-garde might be,’ Michael Bracewell explained to Kraus. Acker explored the roots of her own subculture, and the roots of those roots too: Burroughs took her to Genet, who took her to the French and anti-French traditions, both homegrown and that of the anti-colonial ...”

“... quite innocent. What if the taxi driver who raped Jo is himself a Mapogo member? Doris just looked straight through this. Jo must be safe, she said. Here is the number, please phone him. The assumption being that any black man will always take more notice if it’s a white man who calls. John Magolego, it turned out, was a very calm, pleasant-sounding and ...”

“... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...”

“... as ‘the practical expression’ of ‘the spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz’. (Weight misses Michael Foot’s 1949 pamphlet on domestic reform entitled Who Are the Patriots Now?) A different kind of identity came to fruition during the Attlee Administration: new institutions were called ‘National’ or ‘British’ instead of ‘Royal’ – the ...”

“... triumph at the carnage were immediately beamed around the world. When it became clear, as it did straight away, that the attack was an appalling error, the US compounded its mistake: President Reagan claimed self-defence and the ship’s commander and crew were awarded high military honours. Two days after the downing of the Iranian airbus, Tehran Radio ...”

“... as wide as 16 points. Corbyn is the most unpopular opposition leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 June, 172 of ...”

“... his parents behind in Germany in 1939, when he escaped for England.When The Emigrants appeared in Michael Hulse’s English translation, in 1996, it was often described as a book about four victims of the Holocaust, which it was not – only two of the emigrants are direct victims. Because the book is deeply invested in questions of fictionality, decipherment ...”

“... peasant who, having stumbled on political power, is unsure how to wield it. Reporting on Michael Portillo’s visit as defence minister to Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1996, Anne Applebaum (coincidentally, for the Evening Standard) has a good old chuckle: Up and down the red carpets he walks, Her Majesty’s aircraft just behind ...”

“... was a brilliant place in Todd’s day, the staff including Patrick Blackett, Willis Jackson, Michael Polanyi and the historian L.B. Namier. When the war came, Todd was made chairman of the chemical committee responsible for the development and production of chemical warfare agents. After the war I served under Todd on a committee that had to make ...”

“... may be yet. The closest parallels to Aids in epidemiological terms are syphilis and Hepatitis B. Michael Adler, in Aids and the Epidemics of History, lists the sudden appearance of syphilis (at the end of the 15th century), its asymptomatic carrier state and predominantly sexual means of transmission as the chief points of similarity. Hepatitis B, as Baruch ...”