“... leaves the historian with a number of quibbles – in particular, the leading role assigned to Michael Collins in all the events of 1919-22. Yet on fundamental interpretation Kee is less dogmatic and, above all, less Anglo-centric; greener here, indeed, than in his previous book, The Green Flag. It is not simply that he adds an Irish dimension to the ...”

“... set in Austin, in which Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara and Natalie Portman are would-be musicians and Michael Fassbender an impresario. I think it’s dreadful. And I doubt I can live long enough now to find its wonder.Malick admitted that perhaps he had been mistaken in forsaking script and drama, or in not developing characters in his movies. I was relieved ...”

“... In​ Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t healthy ...”

“... wave’ science fiction, a quasi-modernist movement centred on New Worlds and figures such as Michael Moorcock, who took over from Carnell as the magazine’s editor in 1964, and M. John Harrison, who became its literary editor in 1968.Ballard’s own fiction was by then moving into its second major phase. This followed a second life-defining trauma. In ...”

“... and Making History (1984), consolidated his critical standing, earning plaudits from John Peel and Robert Christgau.Johnson​ has maintained that ‘writing poetry or making music … is not a substitute for hardcore political activism.’ But his poetry was intertwined with that activism: he drew inspiration from the anti-racist movement and chronicled ...”

“... him. In January, Newsweek was going to run the Lewinsky story, under the by-line of staff reporter Michael Isikoff. At the last minute the editors decided to spike the story as unworthy ‘gossip’. They had lost their nerve. The ensuing Newsweek office battles were leaked (by an e-mail snitch) to Drudge, who promptly made it the subject of his next ...”

“... shaman Harry Smith, is arcane, but the critical world has been primed for its reappearance. Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good and Greil Marcus’s The Invisible Republic – recent accounts of the curious development of American folk music – both devote considerable space to the Smith collection, making impressive claims on its ...”

“... had possessed the native cynicism of Leigh Hunt himself, or – a rather different kind – of Robert Bloomfield, the rustic poet who in 1804 had been paid nearly £4000 for his two little volumes, he would have ruined his gift but he might have made big money. As it was, his best things are so good because they were not the things he wanted to do. The ...”

“... not self-conscious. His interest in the naked as a subject in art is, of course, related to this. Robert Hughes, in the passionate and polemical introduction to the catalogue of the London exhibition, quotes Degas, as reported by George Moore, on the subject of his female nudes: ‘I show them deprived of their airs and graces, reduced to the level of animals ...”

“... The person who elicited his strongest feelings was a young officer met during the war, called Robert MacGill (Hogg ‘loved him’, he said, ‘almost like an adopted son’). Hogg’s conduct was wild, irascible and volatile, both verbally and physically (he got into a number of fist fights at Oxford). He also had what another brother, Neil, described as ...”

“... a physicist and eminent populariser of science told the producer that whereas a genius such as Michael Faraday would have been awarded three different Nobel Prizes had they then existed, Maxwell would only have won one. No room for him on Auntie’s Olympus. I have no idea which of Maxwell’s achievements might have gained this anachronistic reward: his ...”

“... predecessors. Others, including Halley and his London colleague, the irascible natural philosopher Robert Hooke, had the idea that orbiting bodies tended to move in straight lines while at the same time being pulled towards some force-centre. Only Newton fully exploited its implications. He defined forces by the changes they produced in the motions of bodies ...”

“... political edge could be tolerated: anyone who showed any sign of that kind of talent was, like Michael Heseltine, bound to come to grief. By 1987, when the Leaderene had won her third straight election, the Cabinet was stacked with rabbits, nerds and characters with sufficiently low testosterone levels to endure repeated handbagging. Crucially, when ...”

“... and first wife in Vienna, his third wife in Hungary, and close friends (notably Lewis Namier and Michael Karolyi) among émigré intellectuals and political refugees. His later ‘plain man’ affectations notwithstanding, he was multilingual, well-travelled and knowledgeable about European music, architecture and wine. Wrigley brings out those connections ...”

“... connections between these works and subsequent debates over the development of New York – with Robert Moses’s highways, bridges and office towers pitched against Jane Jacobs’s street life and public characters – he is able to show that there is nothing epiphenomenal about urban cultural production. ‘There is a significant and surprisingly direct ...”