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“... off a convincing snarl. Yet he is remembered for certain qualities which appreciate over time. Michael Wreszin’s biography succeeds in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true ...”

“... what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, & how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.’ It has to be said that most of the letters are not up to this level, and many are dreadfully dull. But one reads on, waiting for the next surprise, which is likely to come when least ...”

“... and through: anti-semitic, except when she hoped to benefit from rich Jewish friends; and anti-black (‘Government House with only a coloured staff would put me in my grave,’ she moaned when, many years later, her husband was the Governor of the Bahamas). She was offensive to her servants, and hated the class they came from. Her Fascist sympathies ...”

“... and its Metaphors’. In their attempt to answer the intractable ‘why’ of the massacre, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim sense that the contributory factors they painstakingly assemble don’t quite amount to a reason, and reach for the viral theory. ‘Atrocity,’ they opine, ‘is like a virus known to strike soldiers in combat.’ Charlie Company of ...”

“... engaging chapters in the book are those on Shakespeare, boy actors on the Elizabethan stage and Michael Jackson, all of whom confront us, in Garber’s view, with the radical undecidability that underlies our outrage for disorder. Michael Jackson ‘in performance erases and detraumatises not only the boundaries between ...”

“... the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile manager and an infant editor. Parnell, Michael Davitt and the Land League were accused of having inspired agrarian outrages including murder, arson, horse-gelding and cattle-houghing. Certainly they had developed ostracism as a weapon, causing it to be christened the ‘Boycott’ after the landlord ...”

“... Piero’s Car of Death, with tombs from which emerge figures with skeletons painted on their black body-stockings. He can remark that Piero drew well from life, that he painted St Antony wearing spectacles and reading an excellently represented parchment book, that he displayed to perfection the art of colouring in oils. Vasari was clearly aware that ...”

“... bodies. Beit Sahour is a smaller town on the edge of Bethlehem. Angles are important here too, as Michael Awwad, a well-to-do Palestinian shopkeeper, explains with a diagram drawn on the counter of his hardware shop. In July 1988, he begins, Edmon Ghanem, a 17-year-old Palestinian, was walking by a house in Beit Sahour when a large stone fell from the balcony ...”

“... In First Among Equals, Jeffrey Archer introduces a Labour MP who is likewise endangered by a young black girl ‘in a white leather mini skirt so short it might have been better described as a handkerchief’. But, unlike D.M. Thomas, both Raven and Archer are accomplished storytellers, keen on verisimilitude. Both are skilled in the use of stock ...”

“... Qui trop embrasse, mal étreint. His tribute to the organisational genius of Lord Woolton and Sir Michael Fraser is diminished by the extravagant encomia for Anthony Barber and Cecil Parkinson. We cannot yet write the history of post-Thatcherite Britain, but perhaps it is not too soon to start summarising the characteristics of its prehistory (roughly 55 BC ...”

“... is no coincidence that the best political styles belong to Enoch Powell, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn and Michael Foot, all men ‘committed to working on and defending the idea of the United Kingdom’. As it happens, Mr Powell himself contributes a piece on ‘The Language of Politics’, in which he concludes that although speeches are briefer and politicians a ...”

“... came alum and English wool, and then, momentously, in 1501, the Portuguese trade in spices – black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, ginger. Following after were merchants trading paper, gems, and pearls from India; and soon, the trade in printed books, in cochineal and vermillion, silks and metalware, copper and silver; in sugar, ivory, gold; in Chinese ...”

“... was something like Manager of Decommissioned Underground Material and I had gone to see him with Michael Morris, one of the directors of Artangel, a company that puts on art events in different media in unusual places. He was trying to get permission to use the runnels and platforms for The Vertical Line, a performance piece devised by John Berger. In Ways ...”

“... politicians are turned into actors. They have got to choose an image, and then ‘project’ it. Michael Foot insisted on looking like what he is – ‘the corduroy, the wool tie, the academic’s white hair’ – and was duly run off the court by ‘the warrior queen ... her hair lacquered into Britannia’s golden helmet’. In modern times, York ...”

“... but their power is the greater for that: coming at the end of a description of weather over Black Combe (a recurrent point de repère of the book), they are a formal act of conclusion and interpretation which refuses to interpret. Again and again this is the pattern: the creative energy of the poems is channelled into description, and the wisdom of the ...”