“... and ten-gallon hats. Now, as we lurch uncertainly into the second term, comes Professor Michael Rogin of the University of California with a serious thesis on Reagan and celluloid. And now I wish that I had paid more attention to the obvious. At the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in New Orleans, Rogin gave a paper ...”

“... burning, by thinking instead of Noel              asleep, In some cool room ... One white hand on the white Unrumpled sheet. One could see all this as typical of a brief Late Victorian interlude in sexual history, when professed emancipation co-existed with still-effective female chastity – the flirtatious ...”

“... than ignoring the bee-stings of a dissident leftist – Noam Chomsky, say, or Ralph Nader, perhaps Michael Moore – had had him imprisoned. Astonishment would quickly give way to fear of speaking out. The incarceration of one person, the right person, can be an act of the most ruthless efficiency, chaotic kangaroo-court tableaux notwithstanding. So Saad, a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in 1995. Mossbourne’s first head, or ‘principal’ as they are often called in academies, was Michael Wilshaw, who subsequently became chief inspector at Ofsted.Both City and Mossbourne began with a single cohort of Year 7s (11 and 12-year-olds) before building up to a full school and sixth form after seven years, which gave their heads time to decide how ...”

“... a single minute of the coverage of the escape, because we were to see that videotape – the white car tootling down the highway, the press helicopters covering it from above – over and over again during the subsequent week. Not that watching it after the fact is the same as watching it when the outcome is still unresolved. It’s rather like watching ...”

“... Briefly during the second act Michael Frayn’s stage-play, Make and Break, transcends its setting, a Frankfurt trade fair, touching on a general gloom. Mrs Rogers is treating Garrard, a goatish sales rep, to the fruits of Buddhism. It is late in the day. Elsewhere assignations are arranged, faces stuffed, drinks swilled ...”

“... Paris and London, Peter Hall edits an SSRC Working Party’s Reports on The Inner City in Context, Michael Harloe, in New Perspectives in Urban Change and Conflict, edits papers given at the third Centre for Environmental Studies Conference in 1979, David Donnison reflects on his time as Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission in The Politics of ...”

“... to All Quiet on the Western Front. But he died in 1970, leaving it unfinished: a massive stub. Michael Hofmann, his translator, recalls some other unfinished fictions. But this is not The Mystery of Edwin Drood or The Man without Qualities. Those two books lack their ends, but what remains doesn’t feel raw or rough; they simply break off. The Promised ...”

“... warmed by the Moonies’ unconditional support for him during Watergate, invited Moon to the White House, where the two men prayed together. Nixon’s fall was a grievous blow to Moon, who immediately set out on a campaign of extreme right-wing agitation to reverse what he saw as the decline into leftism inaugurated by Watergate. The Moonie ...”

“... of personal history and the pretty stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the ...”

“... The new generation of readers, it was felt, did not have much time to think, much less read. Michael Jackson’s antics are now accorded front-page prominence; the books page has been replaced by full-colour spreads on fashion and celebrity lifestyles. Other newspapers, struggling to hold their own against the visual media, have imitated the Times’s ...”

“... Apollo in 1976. In France, ‘Curval’s name is as well-known as Frank Herbert’s in America or Michael Moorcock’s in Britain.’ Brave Old World transports us to ‘Marcom’ – the EEC as it will have developed in the late 21st century. Britain is apparently still in. But since the whole action takes place where France used to be, we are not yet the ...”

“... at the time. Stamm’s second novel, Unformed Landscape (translated like Stamm’s other books by Michael Hofmann), told the story of a 28-year-old Norwegian woman called Kathrine who leaves her second husband and son and, dipping below the Arctic circle for the first time in her life, travels first to Jutland, then to Paris and eventually to Boulogne in ...”

“... be as slight or profound as you like – it’s still loss, and therefore what we’re all about. Michael Bywater knows this. His Lost Worlds regrets the passing of Beans, Grandpa (‘My maternal grandfather is four ways lost. He is dead. He was a man of Monmouthshire. He was a steel man. He was an industrial craftsman. You don’t get much more lost than ...”