“... but not by the thought of the poll tax. It happened to be the same cabinet meeting which Michael Heseltine had stormed out of, to tell the waiting press that he was resigning from the government over the Westland issue. That was the big story, for politicians and journalists alike. The poll tax became an afterthought. The press didn’t pursue it ...”

“... am not heart-broken. I have attended several opening ceremonies. On the flight, my brother-in-law, Michael Slater (Michael Pasternak, according to his ticket) is unable to read because the Aeroflot jumbo doesn’t have individual seat lights. He has the aisle seat – exiled to inner darkness. Speaking of darkness, what a ...”

“... danger, from which they were saved only by his death seven years later. Our author and his son Michael were born in the safety of South Africa and England only because the rabbi’s untimely demise left a penniless widow and nine children with no means of support and no choice but to emigrate. Of course, Heshel could not have known what was coming, and ...”

“... and evaluating international markets.Even when their projects failed – Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe write that a McKinsey-led reorganisation of the NHS in 1974 was a ‘proliferation of paper’ and a bureaucratic mess – they were hired again and again by the British government to reduce employee numbers and institute unpopular ...”

“... and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen ...”

“... banshees. But at the end of the last century M.R. James’s head lay easy, pillowed on Eton and King’s. In the introduction to this reissue, ‘Monty’s’ stories are made, by one of the Oxford Book editors, to look like a game which registers a displacement of the erotic. ‘Even the deepest friendship of his life, with James McBryde, stopped well ...”

“... It was American scientists who went ballistic over Velikovsky, not historians, and one purpose of Michael Gordin’s probing and intelligent The Pseudoscience Wars is to ask why they responded to Velikovsky as they did. Putting that sort of question is a sign of changed times. Passions have cooled; circumstances have altered. Almost all previous books about ...”

“... even the photography was practised and programmed. ‘They would loan us a Hasselblad,’ said Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 mission, who stayed behind in the moon’s orbit in Columbia, the command module, while his companions descended to its surface. Mia Fineman, curator of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New ...”

“... fortress that dominates writing on foreign policy and international affairs’. This is Michael Edwards’s formulation, and his book, Future Positive, urges them to do better. Daniel Bell rises to this challenge in East Meets West, a series of fictional dialogues about human rights in East Asia. Bell’s East Asian interlocutors express some of the ...”

“... for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these sorts of disclosure. They have never known whether to treat such episodes as normal or exceptional. It is, for example, perfectly true to say that the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Thousands of sesterces might be won and lost, but most of it was the emperor’s money anyway. King in all but name, Augustus governed alone for more than four decades. ‘He seduced the army with bonuses,’ according to Tacitus (in Michael Grant’s translation of the Annals), ‘and his cheap food policy was ...”

“... through state and society in these years came from the very top. As prince of Wales and then king, Edward VII gambled, had mistresses and corrupted his protectors into indulging his whims, while his son was linked to the sordid allegations about aristocrats and male prostitutes in Cleveland Street. Edward was particularly obsessed with dress, which ...”

“... But they were heard by men trained to understand nothing but the absolute sovereignty of the king-in-Parliament, and for whom ideas of federation or devolution, let alone self-government, were delusory or actively pernicious.Two centuries later, the Kilbrandon Report of 1973 shied away from any sort of federal solution, on the grounds that it worked ...”

“... But nothing availed against the combined hostility of the prosecutor, Brian Leary, and the judge, Michael Argyle QC. The jury convicted, and the accused were jailed. They were bailed pending appeal, and in November 1971 their appeals were allowed on the ground that Argyle had failed to give the jury an adequate direction on the meaning of obscenity, in ...”