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“... however, that we are ‘now moving back to the middle’. He means that we are moving way from Michael Portillo’s pompously ignorant remarks a few days ago when he gave his Israeli hosts carte blanche to do what they liked in Lebanon. I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the plane, I read Auden and ...”

“... Web’, which claims that language waters down the child’s vivid apprehension of roses, the ‘black wastes of evening sky’ and the drumming of soldiers. But if we try to get back behind it, Facing the wide glare of the children’s day, Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums, We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.The repetition makes the ...”

“... two, he is being consciously naive. He knows perfectly well he will be judged principally against Michael Holroyd, whose multi-volume Shaw is one of the longest, most detailed, comprehensive and highly praised biographies of the 20th century. Gibbs’s major charge against Holroyd is that he allowed himself to be taken in by Shaw’s description of a ...”

“... at war. This was felt at every level, from the murder of two first cousins and the memory of the Black and Tans hammering on the door to the misery of living in grey corporation housing during Jim’s internment. Their uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters were IRA activists, many of them high up in the organisation; Eileen’s brother Jack Lynch was the ...”

“... a long lyric mist’. And a woman serving a long prison sentence prays: She looked deep into the black of her closed eyes. Stared into the dark. When your sense of vision has very little stimulation, it invents images. Sarah doesn’t know that the name for this is Prisoner’s Cinema. It is a trick of the mind, blindness turned into glorious ...”

“... another factor, which Mortimer is the first biographer to be able to take into account. In 1998, Michael Bennett revealed that a badly burned charter in the Cottonian Collection, just readable under ultraviolet light, was a copy of a previously unknown declaration by Edward III of October 1376, strictly limiting the royal succession to his male heirs and ...”

“... died, and a fifth is missing. At the start, her daughter has received what may well be the missing Michael’s clothes, washed up from the sea ‘in the far north’ at Donegal. During the course of the play, Maurya tries to persuade her remaining son, Bartley, not to ride off with the horses to the Galway fair, predicting that he, too, will be taken by the ...”

“... of a family name such as Bellegueule is a challenge to even the most skilful translator. Michael Lucey opts for ‘Prettymug’, which is as close as English gets: a man with ‘une belle gueule’ tends to be rugged and macho, while one with ‘un beau visage’ is handsome in a more standard fashion. When combined with Eddy (very much not ...”

“... to keep a tight rein on her three daughters. Adaline’s moral code was worked out in what Michael Holroyd in his introduction memorably terms the ‘moral gymnasium’ of the last Victorian decades. He characterises it, too harshly, as a culture of ‘conceit and condemnation … complacency and fear of change’, but it was a period when conventions ...”

“... whites who fled Queens and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s for the Long Island suburbs to escape black migration. They went one way and Trump another, but both were repelled by Manhattan’s racial liberalism, which was seen as an insult to and impingement on their own status from those above and below them.Trump’s loathing and bullying are among the few ...”

“... up through years of familiarity and ‘surrogate parenting’. Thus when a white madam said of her black maid, ‘she’s one of the family,’ it was not entirely (or not only) a ‘sentimental obfuscation’.My parents too, like most people of their class, habitually spoke of their servants as ‘part of the family’; and for us children, wrapped in the ...”

“... as ‘the practical expression’ of ‘the spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz’. (Weight misses Michael Foot’s 1949 pamphlet on domestic reform entitled Who Are the Patriots Now?) A different kind of identity came to fruition during the Attlee Administration: new institutions were called ‘National’ or ‘British’ instead of ‘Royal’ – the ...”

“... with a great appetite for the written word, both in Latin and in vernacular languages. After the Black Death the economy of Latin Europe provided new opportunities for enterprising peasants and for migrants to the towns. Fifteenth-century domestic architecture attests to prosperity; court cultures flourished. This was the golden age of Burgundy – of ...”

“... 1943 Klein asked Milner, whose practice she was supervising, to take on her 11-year-old grandson Michael (the boy known as Simon in Milner’s 1952 case study on symbol formation), who was ‘suffering from a loss of talent for schoolwork’. Klein neither recused herself from supervising the analysis, nor held back her disapproval of Milner’s ...”

“... David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall meet!’ It would have been equally ...”