“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... critic.’ A few years later Styron wrote about his bout with what Churchill called ‘the black dog’ in a memoir, originally published in Vanity Fair, called Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990). It was an instant bestseller with staying power. ‘Curious to think that a slender little volume about lunacy may provide a meal ticket for my ...”

“... focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a plain design, black on grey. Memorials are small incidents of civic amnesia, a way of letting go. If you place such a thing on a high wall, nobody sees it. I’d worked, years ago, shifting sacks of Christmas mail, at Liverpool Street, King’s Cross and St Pancras, but I had ...”

“... elucidate, that accounts for its lasting presence. She is a daughter of a king of Colchis on the Black Sea, a princess from a country beyond the bounds of civilisation as the Greeks saw it. The golden fleece (of a magical sacrificed ram) is the sacred cult object of her country, guarded by terrible fire-breathing monsters (a colossal snake or a dragon ...”

“... plotting. They keep plotting, and this has been going on for so long and everybody knows it …’Michael Bloomberg After the former Republican New York mayor endorsed Clinton at the Democratic Convention (‘Let’s elect a sane, competent person’), Trump said: ‘I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, I was gonna hit this guy so ...”

“... of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in Harlem. We wanted to leaf through the ...”

“... of biography format with a leavening of category entries on such topics as ‘Pseudonyms’, ‘Black Feminist Criticism’, ‘Science Fiction’. There are no plot summaries, no entries on works or on principal characters in works, no cross-reference one-liners. The gaze is unblinkingly on women’s lives as the ground from which women’s writing ...”

“... a long flight to Jakarta. ‘Eric Lustbader?’ suggested Sean, and I shook my head. I’d seen Michael Herr sending dispatches. The hours flew by. The Beach is studded with non-cinematic references to popular culture of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on ...”