“... nature more evident than in the field of sex. Writing a long letter in 1941 to his 21-year-old son Michael on this difficult topic, he makes discouraging play with the fact: ‘In this fallen world the “friendship” that should be possible between all human beings, is virtually impossible between man and woman. The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is ...”

“... that Islam was somehow ‘different’ from the West. A more fruitful approach is taken by Michael Gilsenan in Lords of the Lebanese Marches, based on field work he conducted in a Sunni Muslim rural area of North Lebanon during the early Seventies, before the recent civil war. This beautifully written book describes the culture of masculinity in its ...”

“... the brink of those works entering the public domain, the public whose domain it is was informed by Michael Black of Cambridge University Press that the standard Lawrence texts were culpably imperfect. A new authorised edition was put in hand – and a new copyright thereby created. As I recall, the Lawrence estate’s agents, Laurence Pollinger, initially ...”

“... completely were they forgotten that last year, when the environmental consultants Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger rebuked the environmental movement for neglecting the resources of economic growth and human ingenuity, they seemed unaware that there had once been a movement in America that championed both. Nordhaus and Shellenberger wrote Break ...”

“... the world spirit. But in reality, much of Weakelek’s time was, I assume, spent watching Michael Rockefeller, the millionaire photographer, opening tinned food outside the Harvard tent. The Dani must have questioned the reality of their own wars, with the crew openly filming and, no doubt, encouraging them not to look at the camera while engaged in ...”

“... By my count​ , of the 37 photographs of Michael Ovitz in this book there are 19 in which his mouth stays shut – while he’s smiling. That isn’t intended as a hostile remark. His mouth stayed closed when he smiled because he was concentrating. You may not have heard of him, but for maybe a decade and a half starting in the mid-1970s no one in the motion picture business was more focused than Michael Ovitz ...”

“... but it is immortalised in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in which Sejanus (a young Patrick Stewart in the BBC adaption) is presented by his successor, Macro, with the letter ordering his summary execution and the butchery of all his family. After seven years at the apex of power, Macro was driven to suicide by Tiberius’ young heir, Caligula. Wherever ...”

“... manage the necessary tonal shift out of what has largely been a comic novel; it’s as if Rod Stewart were to try on Die Winterreise. Indian Killer is in every sense a bigger book than its predecessors: longer and yet tighter in structure, far more ambitious and far less good-humoured. The novel’s initial premise suggests a powerful literary ...”

“... are the questions the later part of the novel asks in subtle detail but doesn’t answer. As Susan Stewart says in her introduction, the initial crimes ‘gradually fade in relation to the story of Langlois’s astonishing response to them’. The locals worry about what has happened. ‘Aren’t there courts and an executioner in Paris?’ But they talk ...”

“... of the European war. In I Confess, the war appears to suggest a reason why Clift’s character, Michael Logan, should become a Roman Catholic priest. The war had made these characters, giving them confidence, troubling them with memories. So it was perhaps that the 1950s were the decade of neurosis. For all their resistance to the ‘torn T-shirt ...”

“... little time for the activities of his mother. Another investigation of the Queen of Scots, that by Michael Lynch and his team, is not aimed at the general reader, for it assumes a firm grasp of the main events of her life. It explores areas of less common interest: her court, her library, her use of her French jointure, her policy towards the house of ...”

“... intelligence and originality in its young author. There is nothing remotely Paterian about J.I.M. Stewart’s A Villa in France, despite the fact that the anti-hero is a sexually ambiguous, Oxford-educated aesthete. If a 19th-century paternity exists for this novel, it is surely in the mannered accomplishments of George Meredith, who is credited in passing ...”

“... Unionism. Unsurprisingly, Unionists had few friends in the newspapers. A bizarre exception was Michael Wharton, a satirical and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions ...”

“... by the market, still a fake? What does intention matter if your audience doesn’t care about it? Michael ‘Butcher’ Boone, one of the two narrators of Theft, is a once famous Australian artist, newly divorced and down on his luck. His work is now very unfashionable, and he has retreated to a rustic house in New South Wales owned by his patron. Here, ...”

“... Allen, too. The outline of the life is simple enough, and has been laid out many times. Allan Stewart Konigsberg was born in the Bronx in 1935, although the family was living in Brooklyn, where he grew up. Dilatory and bored in school, he spent much of his time at the movies. He rose to unlikely success by writing gags for newspaper columns and television ...”