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“... other writers would dedicate a whole chapter.Nowhere is this better displayed than in his novella Michael Kohlhaas, first published in its entirety in 1810. It tells the story of a husband, father, horse dealer and ‘good citizen’ who, while attempting to cross into Saxony to sell his wares, gets ripped off and mocked by the Junker of the castle at the ...”

“... an early suffragist. She knew how to earn good money as a dressmaker and hen-keeper. Her husband Michael Cleary was an educated and literate cooper, whose services were much in demand by local businesses. He had served his apprenticeship in the progressive town of Clonmel and had good prospects. As a couple, they seemed the very image of a modernising ...”

“... hint of Blakean innocence; their less peaceful suggestion that even mirrored animals can snarl and burn. It is understandable that the creator of the fulsome Fevvers should not be drawn to the ‘wet and spineless’ heroines of the Seventies, ‘the zomboid creatures in Joan Didion’s novels, for example’. I have always found it curious that Didion, who in ...”

“... historical judgment: From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished ...”

“... for the Barbarians, to the desire for ultimate anonymity and inscrutability in Life & Times of Michael K, or Mrs Curran’s abject retraction of her past in Age of Iron, or the haughty refusal to confess to the politically correct commission of inquiry into sexual harassment in Disgrace: ‘What goes on in my mind is my business, not yours.’ Coetzee has ...”

“... But there is, apparently, more competition for the honour than up the road at Bertorelli’s. Michael Foot passes by and nods, albeit ‘briefly’. Marcia Williams sweeps in: expect no nods from her. She comes under the novelist’s scalpel: ‘She’s an attractive woman, her face has a good bone structure, but there’s something curiously unreal about ...”

“... in the form of an objective, linear chronicle, cannot turn these omissions to narrative advantage. Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying has been a successful amateur boxer and a waist-gunner in B-17s during the bombing of Germany. Later on he writes what is said to be one of the finest contemporary American poems, ‘Coming Clean’, and later still he ...”

“... by order of the court, resulting in the destruction of the main prosecution witness against Michael Hickey, the youngest of the accused, though not his aquittal. At the original trial, these files were inaccessible to the defence. It’s only when the Home Office is stirred into action, as it finally was in the Guildford case following publication of ...”

“... images stay the same: St George has spiny armour like a dragon’s in order to face the beast, St Michael ditto in his victory over Satan. But art is ceremony only up to a point. Artists can be imprisoned by the art world’s expectations, condemned to repeat the story that brought them to its attention. Their work may have the comforting assurance of ...”

“... Man and Kapo – in the 1970s, and all three are now available in English (superbly translated by Michael Henry Heim, Bernard Johnson and Richard Williams). In their determination that the very worst be said, they are grim but not depressing – exhilarating, even. Each novel is quite different in structure and tone; what they share is a radical narrative ...”

“... and said: “No fair, I wanted to steal the TV set.”’ The striking thing about this – as Michael Malone points out in his ultra-detailed history of Apple, Infinite Loop – is that there isn’t a shred of truth in the idea that Gates had the GUI first. It was pure gorilla-think. ‘In his peculiar and dangerous manner, Gates didn’t look upon the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Durrell); butter news editor: Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis: Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (aka Henry Miller); and Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan as the literary editors. As Dearborn notes in a wonderful chapter on life at the Villa Seurat, Miller’s Paris address, ‘most of the editors were ...”

“... disaster in New York is striking, and it makes a couple of things clear. First, while the markets burn the art world plays on, and London is now its undisputed capital. Second, even as titans fall, there are still lots of high rollers with money to burn on art, at least outside the US (American buyers were scarce at the ...”

“... of the living – mopping, mowing, gibbering, giving their owl’s cries, causing the tapers to burn blue, sheeted, but never in any circumstances nude. The last of these superstitions is commemorated in a story by A.E. Coppard, chosen for the Oxford Book, in which a dressy female revenant performs a more than usually disappointing strip-tease. She is also ...”