“... he found her bed was made out of an ancient iconostasis, ‘hardly suitable for a piece of holy wood but perhaps all right for a crowned and anointed queen’. One of his best chapters is the account of his visit to Thailand as the guest of Prince Chula, who had been a Cambridge undergraduate when Runciman was a young don at Trinity. At a ball in Bangkok a ...”

“... studio in Virginia. The film moves (rather in the same way as Dean’s tremendous portrait of old Michael Hamburger fondling his apples) from a world of light and vitality, glimpsed through the studio blinds, towards a final montage of grey trees against a storm-warning sky. Halfway through the exhibition one turns off into Soane’s strange shrunken ...”

“... There is also one Michael Agnolo from Caravaggio who is doing marvellous things in Rome ... He thinks little of the works of other masters ... All works of art he believes to be ‘Bagatelli’, child’s play, whoever by, and whatever of, unless they are made from life, and that there is no better course than to follow Nature ...”

“... story: When Did We Go to Morocco? or It Can’t Be True or Haven’t We Met? Of It Can’t Be True Michael Auping says: ‘It is echo-like in its composition. It is composed of a series of tilting frames jostling each other for position within the whole. The eye is teased back to a bright yellow frame in the centre of the painting and stopped short by a series ...”

“... was something like Manager of Decommissioned Underground Material and I had gone to see him with Michael Morris, one of the directors of Artangel, a company that puts on art events in different media in unusual places. He was trying to get permission to use the runnels and platforms for The Vertical Line, a performance piece devised by John Berger. In Ways ...”

“... were, inspiringly, within a few hundred feet of Hard-wick Hall; later, he convalesced at Hare-wood House. Stirling claimed that it was lying in bed under the Adam ceiling in the great Gallery that he determined on a career in architecture. Immediately after the war, he entered the Liverpool School of Architecture. The recently demobilised students were ...”

“... the baker’s wife, Rosina Zoft, allows Katharina to use her bread oven from time to time; Michael Stahl, who owns a shed, lets her store her grain there; when she needs fresh milk, neighbours supply it. She, in turn, dispenses homemade herbal remedies, lends money and makes gifts of food and wine. Resentments arise when too little or too much is ...”

“... the most famous criminal in the country’s history, Louis Mandrin, established his reputation. As Michael Kwass explains in his excellent book, flourishing global trade and domestic economic expansion had combined to create a vast new consumer market for imported goods: sugar, chocolate, coffee, tea, tobacco, porcelain, fabrics, spices and much else. By the ...”

“... on the incoming secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and Trump’s now ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The rhetoric emanating from US politicians and media commentators too seems to be drawn from another era. In November, a murky online group called PropOrNot went full McCarthy by releasing ‘The List’, designed to name and shame – or indeed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Thomas Kinsella’s New Oxford Book goes right back to the beginning, to a rath in front of an oak wood singled out for comment by some anonymous poet of the sixth century, and cherished as a survival from an even more distant past, while the Faber book takes as its starting-point (as the blurb has it) the death of Yeats. The American publisher and critic ...”

“... epoxy, And views the dole queues others would condemn As growing proof that cutting out dead wood Can in the long run only lead to good. No need to say those millions on the dole Are there because the Government decrees it. The contrary idea is a live coal, A notion so dire that the mind can’t seize it. Suppose that unemployment on the whole Would ...”

“... of his novel, leading us back from impending departure into the events of the previous year. Michael is an unprepossessing family man. He takes what he likes and abuses the rest, which is sometimes his wife. When her pregnancy entered its advanced stages, she became useless, no longer pleasurable, and he left her for the consolations of his ...”

“... thereupon knew what he must do with his life. The story fits almost too neatly with that of Michael Ventris, the decipherer of Linear B, who went with a school party at the age of 14 to a London exhibition of Greek and Minoan artefacts and happened to hear Sir Arthur Evans no less, the excavator of Knossos, explain that no one had yet been able to ...”

“... In the Woody Allen movie Hannah and Her Sisters Eliot (Michael Caine) contrives to cross paths on a Manhattan street with his sister-in-law. Lee (Barbara Hershey), with whom he has fallen in love. He pretends to be hunting for a bookshop: she shows him the way to it and there he finds, as if by chance, E.E. Cummings’s Collected Poems, which he insists on buying for her ...”