“... Diana Ross, on her way to Paris to make a ‘highly personal’ (auteuriste?) film about Josephine Baker, was asked if she was going to write the script herself: someone else, she trilled, would have to do ‘the paperwork’. Meryl Streep spoke glowingly of sticking to the text when they filmed The French Lieutenant’s Woman from Harold Pinter’s script. I ...”

“... and a couple of tins of beer.’ One remembers the bag of ginger biscuits Hannay bought from a baker’s van in The Thirty-Nine Steps. But mainly it’s a sense of the past that gives this story an extra dimension and makes the Wordsworth quotation sit comfortably in place. It’s true that the main reference back is to more violence, a long-range desert ...”

“... joke monsters like Hamilton, but the day-in, day-out ignominy of being ruled by men like Kenneth Baker and Norman Fowler, John Wakeham and Michael Howard; of turning on your TV to see Michael Heseltine in a combat jacket, or Ann Widdecombe waving a pair of handcuffs, or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shortage of actual instances of articulate unbelief. This intriguing paradox lies at the heart of Michael Hunter’s book, which combines lightly revised versions of his previously published essays with newly written chapters to advance a distinctive argument about the significance of atheism in England and Scotland before the Enlightenment. Building on his ...”

“... questions has become: what is analytical philosophy? An influential answer has been provided by Michael Dummett, until recently the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford and the author of several important books on Frege and the philosophy of language. Significantly, Dummett’s most recent books have been concerned with history, particularly his Origins of ...”

“... him).Brando was right, judging by the 2004 movie version of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford. The film itself is a pedestrian and pretty adaptation that can’t quite decide where it stands on the antisemitism of the main characters, but Pacino is an excellent Shylock, emphasising the character’s furious dignity in the face of ...”

“... stood on the site of the vegetable garden (or orto) of an eighth-century monastery dedicated to St Michael, so it was nicknamed Or-san-michele. In the centuries since, it has been transformed from market to church to museum. Its latest incarnation, the newly restored Museo Orsanmichele, considers the artistic and architectural innovations of each successive ...”

“... the only one to reduce loads to below planning standard on the Metropolitan/Circle line east of Baker Street. It has some effect on the District and Piccadilly Lines around Earl’s Court; this is because many passengers from the Ealing area would use Crossrail in preference to the Underground. A bill was submitted to Parliament in 1991, and reluctantly ...”

“... spoke fluently and agreeably, without passion. George W. Bush had lately ignored the advice of the Baker Commission to withdraw from Iraq, and had ordered the ‘surge’ of additional troops headed by General Petraeus; there was a feeling close to despair among the arts and media crowd in the room, but Obama mentioned none of that: you might have thought the ...”

“... Shakespeare’s alleged sojourn among the Lancashire recusants, first put forward by Oliver Baker in 1937 but given much fuller and more closely argued treatment by Honigmann. One might expect a biographer to feel obliged to pass judgment as to whether an episode with such far-reaching implications actually happened or not, but Honan declines to make ...”

“... is a public discussion forum dedicated to the conflict in Northern Ireland. It was founded by Michael O’Hare, who, as a young man in County Armagh, had seen the violence and disdain with which British soldiers could treat Catholic families such as his own. In 1976, a British paratrooper shot dead his 12-year-old sister, Majella. Like Andy, ...”

“... to the House of Lords in Thatcher’s farewell Honours List in 1991. In the same year, Kenneth Baker got a job on Hanson’s board. In the Thatcher years, Hanson felt he was part of the Government. He demanded and got an interview with Nigel Lawson in which he offered to buy the BP shares the Government were selling – for six billion pounds. Lawson ...”

“... filmed and the written. In literature there is no clock time, no ‘real time’. When Nicholson Baker decides to set a whole novel in a lunch break (The Mezzanine) or Olaf Stapledon chooses a timescale of two billion years for Last and First Men, no technical innovation is necessary. They aren’t inventing a freedom but exercising one inherent in the ...”

“... start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated. Thomas, as Robert Frost reminded him, ‘knew the worth of [his] bays’. However, it is unwise to die in war when a ...”