“... the spiritual and religious concerns of The Aerodrome, hinted at by the epigraph, a verse of George Herbert’s about sin and love. Rex Warner was a Classical scholar, and his prose – carved, marble-hard, balanced – reads like a very good translation of Classical Latin. The story he tells, with children’s discovery of lost parents and of parental ...”

“... thoughtfully about from one clan grave to another while the present Stuart claimant to the throne, Michael James Alexander, was being interviewed by BBC Scotland. He is a gentle Belgian socialist who once worked as a waiter in Edinburgh but has taken up PR. ‘I felt it was important to attend,’ he told the cameras. ‘Ethnic cleansing was carried out after ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mother’s execution, were alarmed to discover that the greatest of the Scottish Catholic peers, George Gordon, Sixth Earl of Huntly, was rapidly becoming his chief confidant. In 1588 James arranged Huntly’s marriage to Henrietta Stuart, daughter of his former favourite the Duke of Lennox, thus admitting him into the wider royal family. In the following ...”

“... Jennings, who died two years ago, wrote too many poems. She was careless about her output, sending Michael Schmidt, her editor at Carcanet, ‘sacks’ of manuscript work to sift through and make into a collection. Even he seems occasionally to have lost track. His sympathetic and shrewd introduction records that her own favourite among her poems was ...”

“... DNC speakers so hard their heads would spin, particularly one ‘very little guy’, presumably Michael Bloomberg, who’d implied that Trump was insane and incompetent and could brag of becoming richer than Trump without the help of his father. To my ear the most effective attack on Trump was Joe Biden’s line that it was perverse to hand over the US ...”

“... last joke in 1988 when she made an appearance on Aspel and Company, the ITV chat show hosted by Michael Aspel, one of a handful of Alan Partridgesque men who for decades had a monopoly on interviewing film stars on British TV. Taylor had recently completed her second stint at the Betty Ford Centre, where she was treated for alcoholism and other addictions ...”

“... of pre-Civil War England, the Duke of Newcastle recalled that a wealthy Cheshire knight like Sir George Booth had been proud to appear on St George’s Day clad in the livery of the Earl of Shrewsbury; and, on state occasions, the proudest courtier might, like the humblest of grooms, be clad in a costume that signalled the ...”

“... but a makeshift coathanger he has rigged up over the bath in order to dry his anorak.14 January. George Fenton tells me of a memorial service he’s been to at St Marylebone Parish Church for Maurice Murphy, the principal trumpet of the LSO, who did the opening trumpet solo in the music for Star Wars. The service due to kick off at 11.30, ...”

“... the meaningful non-statement is odd but, for the reader, it has a curiously addictive quality. As Michael Wood excellently put it, we repeatedly find ourselves asking ‘why we are smiling when there doesn’t seem to be anything to smile about’.Tóibín is not the first person to advance an interpretation of Mann as a virtuoso of life in the closet, and he ...”

“... a person of no nonsense: ‘You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind – no, sir!’ In tragedy the significance of names tends to bleed out belatedly, as part of a ...”

“... against Women Act. It ultimately passed the Senate 78-22.)In the merry-go-round of familiar faces, Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, says he has yet another client with information about further assaults by Kavanaugh and his friends in high school. (In Maryland, where they lived, there is no statute of limitations on sexual assault.)President ...”

“... one hand, the adventures of people like North, John Poindexter, Dennis Ross, Howard Teicher and Michael Ledeen, and, on the other hand, the amazing pudeur of the Secretary of State, whose position on Irangate matters, according to the Tower Report, was one of complete detachment. Representative Tom Lantos of California (a Hungarian by birth) could announce ...”

“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”

“... as a US citizen was specially arranged to suit his sense of its importance, presided over by Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s appointee as head of the Department of Homeland Security, and conducted on Jefferson’s birthday at the Jefferson Memorial. ‘There was a very stiff breeze blowing across the Tidal ...”