“... ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the whole genre as philistine, and ...”

“... others – ‘True and False Self’ and ‘The Use of an Object’ – are lifted straight from Winnicott’s writing. Bechdel tells us his life story, lays his 18 reasons out on the page (reminding us that he was ‘revolutionary’ for using ‘he or she’ and ‘his or her’ decades before anyone else). She also graphically pursues him ...”

“... close on the flat. And this uncertainty spreads. Writers on Infidelity have often been aware – Michael Podro most eloquently – that Veronese’s main way of conveying the uncertainty of ‘positions’ in the circuit of Love is by drawing the viewer into a game of unreadable orientations. The woman’s back, shoulders and arms are at the heart of ...”

“... that transcends ‘the left-right divide’. He seemed proud of quotes he’d found that made Michael Oakeshott echo Hannah Arendt – ‘whose work has really influenced my work’ – and Matthew Arnold agree with Lenin, though ‘you couldn’t be further apart than Lenin and Arnold on most things.’ It’s difficult to give a fair account of his ...”

“... equality of opportunity are based.But what is a ‘genuine sense’ of meritocracy? When, in 1958, Michael Young put the term into general circulation with the publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy (he did not, as is often assumed, coin the term), the suffix pointed to an analogy with democracy or aristocracy as forms of rule or government. It suggested ...”

“... line to Putin … he would not be making a regular spectacle of himself,’ the military analyst Michael Kofman, recently returned from Bakhmut, said in a podcast. ‘The reason he’s doing it is because he’s very desperate and he’s trying to get Putin’s attention by speaking to him this way, the way I would say some years ago I used to see people on ...”

“... fascist Christian terrorist and mystic Corneliu Codreanu, founder of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, later known as the Iron Guard, and Marshal Ion Antonescu, dictator during the Second World War, were responsible for the killing. Codreanu, strangled on royal orders in 1938, was the hugely influential prophet of a fanatical creed of blood, soil and ...”

“... musicians. There were talented singers in his social circle, notably the opera singer Johann Michael Vogl, but Schubert would often sing and play his songs himself. He had a nice voice and was a good pianist, but one wonders what these renditions must have sounded like. The technical demands of the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise were ...”

“... get to look backwards, to say where things began. Brontë biographers have to acknowledge straight away not only the great distance separating them and us (or they ought to), but how many hills and trees now interrupt our view. It’s a truism that all Brontë biographers respond to Gaskell, but there are now thousands of other books too. Winifred ...”

“... and the melodrama work hand in hand. The moral of the film would have been queasier with, say, Michael Redgrave and John Mills in these roles. There is no other movie on which Welles worked quite this alchemy; but there are few enough actors who have done it once. Harry Lime was a romantic part, as was Mr Rochester, and a secondary thesis of Conrad’s ...”

“... and every major political system and religion. The book would like to do for free speech what Michael Sandel’s Justice did for justice; and the aspiration in this sort of endeavour is to address a high-minded public without assuming much previous knowledge.An optimistic ground tone is preserved throughout: the multiplication of our connections will ...”

“... a popular iconography, Andy Warhol is probably the most single-minded and the most spectacular,’ Michael Fried wrote in Art International in December 1962. ‘Warhol’s beautiful, vulgar, heartbreaking icons of Marilyn Monroe … and [his] feeling for what is truly human and pathetic is one of the exemplary myths of our time.’ The architect Philip Johnson ...”

“... the other extreme free-market, state-lite policies that let the weak go to the wall – or rather, straight to landfill. In a letter from London in November, Le Monde’s correspondent Philippe Bernard was dismayed to discover that refuse collectors in the UK now carry out checks on large bins meant for commercial waste and recyclables, in case they load a ...”

“... in middle age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... Littlehampton at the westernmost edge of the county. They sort two and a half million items a day. Michael Fehilly, Gatwick’s manager, strode around in a grey pinstripe suit, brown loafers and an open-necked pink shirt. He’s second-generation Irish. ‘My dad tells me I’m a plastic Paddy, not a real one,’ he said. He grew up on a council estate in ...”