“... In the Woody Allen movie Hannah and Her Sisters Eliot (Michael Caine) contrives to cross paths on a Manhattan street with his sister-in-law. Lee (Barbara Hershey), with whom he has fallen in love. He pretends to be hunting for a bookshop: she shows him the way to it and there he finds, as if by chance, E.E. Cummings’s Collected Poems, which he insists on buying for her ...”

“... answers to its own implied questions. It is a work of strange, muted power and intelligence. Michael Schmidt doesn’t make entry to The Dresden Gate easy. For quite some time I was totally confused about how the various characters related one to another. And I never understood why these people with Spanish names in an unspecified South or Central ...”

“... times it was thought that forested land tended to offer the most fertile agricultural soil. As Michael Williams carefully describes, for diverse cultures in diverse periods in history, deforestation has been intimately bound up with agricultural aspirations. But because trees impart a unique physical structure to the environment – only ...”

“... thus, to reveal the possibilities that lie in the improbabilities of the world itself. This, as Michael McPherson makes clear in his essay in the Notre Dame collection, is Hirschman’s way. As Hirschman explains in the first essay in his own latest collection, he started his present career by working – ‘with intensity and occasional ...”

“... he would hand it to me slice by slice, each slice gripped firmly under that broad black thumb.’ It may have been something to do with this, but I didn’t mind about missing out on a full Wigan breakfast: we wanted to film the Liverpool pickets as the men who had taken over their work drove past them and through the dock gates at the start ...”

“... since 1985. Whether the truce will hold and whether it will stem the creeping ethnicisation of black politics remains to be seen. But Mandela’s public embrace of Buthelezi has inaugurated a new and intense phase of politicking within and between the two organisations. With Inkatha now poised to play a major role alongside the ANC in the negotiations for ...”

“... who arrived in Brooklyn in the late 1970s. He came from Odessa, the USSR’s freest and most black-market town, a port that welcomed ships from beyond the socialist bloc. As a teenager Volodya would row out in a dinghy to the boats in the harbour, swapping Russian caviar for Turkish cigarettes and Greek suits. When the Odessans came to New York they were ...”

“... Two bishops side by side put pressure at long range on the pawns defending the castled Black king. My queen, ready to advance to the middle of the board, completes the threat. Black will have to weaken his defence by advancing a pawn. There are further forces I can bring into play ...”

“... The best book I know on the relationship between sporting culture and success is Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s account of the 2002 Oakland A’s baseball team.† The argument is compellingly simple: sports teams are run like gentlemen’s clubs rather than businesses, and clubs don’t base their business decisions on facts but on codes and ...”

“... was only one way to make it work – by getting the people who knew him talking. Andrew O’Hagan Michael Wood (film critic): Those working-class lads seemed to be everywhere in British films of the 1960s, grunting and sweating their way through the class system, using sex as a narrow and repressed form of guerrilla warfare. We are often told about the new ...”

“... prime minister.By 1985, Diane Abbott was tired of parliamentary selections, of being the token Black woman on the shortlist and of being rejected. She applied to Hackney North and Stoke Newington only because her secretary at the film technicians’ union, where she was equality officer, drafted the letter for her. She was up against a popular sitting ...”

“... bright afternoon with the paths down to the river covered in untrodden snow and the Wharfe winding black between the drifts. Building at the priory must have been going on until the very eve of the Dissolution, with the uncompleted west tower begun by Abbot Moon in 1520. The confidence such plans imply still surprises me as I’ve never quite got rid of the ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... for his unusual opera, The Plumber’s Gift. David Malouf has devised a Kipling libretto, Baa Baa Black Sheep, for Michael Berkeley. Blake Morrison is, with the composer Gavin Bryars, engaged on an operatic version of Jules Verne’s story, ‘Dr Ox’s Experiment’. Gavin Ewart has provided saucy verses for Robin ...”

“... feeling, they wept. Then, last night, the final twist occurred. The tribe fell upon her assailant, Michael Heseltine, and slew him, too.’ But the mere exclusion of Heseltine from the leadership seemed insufficient atonement for the unnatural enormity of matricide. Within the Tory tribe there was to be no healing, no reconciliation, no closure. This was a ...”