“... magazine editors such as Kingsley Martin and Cyril Connolly, the editors of famous papers such as Michael Foot at the Evening Standard, the great publishers of the day, have all of them left their mark on the cultural history of the time. Their opposite numbers on radio remain to this day largely unknown, or, like Orwell, famous for other reasons. This ...”

“... like Jaguar and Rolls-Royce aeroengines, had been so unwisely privatised, became all too public; Black Wednesday itself, when delusion and false pride were punished with a speed uncommon even in Classical tragedy. One minute the Prime Minister sees the pound as Europe’s hardest currency; the next it is chased out of the ERM, softer than the peseta. And ...”

“... that had successfully salvaged a wilderness from corporate and governmental assaults. Through Michael van Walt van der Praag, a Dutch lawyer long active in the Tibetan cause, he made contact with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation. This gave him access to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which he addressed in ...”

“... revelation in Pickles’s book. ‘I have not been able to reveal until now that it was Mr Justice Michael Davies who suggested that I jail Renshaw for seven days,’ he writes. ‘He asked how long I proposed to give her, and I said 21 days. “No, make it seven,” he said, and I did.’ There is not a trace of irony in this passage. Nor is there in his ...”

“... candidate since Dwight Eisenhower fought Adlai Stevenson in 1952. For the first time, a woman or a black person is guaranteed national elective office in a country that historically has been resistant to both. The two parties are neck and neck in a race in which – unlike in 2000 or 2004 – there is likely to be substantial crossover of support between the ...”

“... iron bars rigged up to the knee, one end of which slotted into deep holes in specially made black boots – until she was 16. During this time she had little contact with her large family, and a perfunctory education. Go through all this, and chances are that the first man who says he loves you, is kind and polite, and doesn’t treat you like a ...”

“... that the song means a great deal to his wife, Gretta, and longer still the essential truth, that Michael Furey, her dead first love, used to sing it to her. These layers of Gabriel’s unknowing are hardly different from our own (‘What about the song? Why does that make you cry?’ ‘And who was the person long ago?’), and at the end of the story, when ...”

“... up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened next:The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, directed only by the shouts of their ...”

“... in the beads of rain on their hair. Standing slightly to one side of the group, framed by the black fence, was a young albino. He was staring at Caleb. His curly hair was as yellow as butter, but he had the build of a Una boy, from his broad face to his wide feet and distended belly. The sun had been at work on his pink skin for ten years, staining it ...”

“... descendant of the parrot given to Shakespeare in 1610 as a gift by his friend and fellow poet Michael Drayton. The Bard was exceedingly fond of the bird, and would speak to her as one might write in a journal – to chronicle, reflect and confess. When he died of fever six years later, Anne Hathaway kept the parrot, and introduced into its cage a younger ...”

“... the Germans were in full murder mode. Historical information and interpretation, based largely on Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews, have also been added. The 2503 photographs themselves: these have been reproduced from identity cards and gravestones, from formal studio portraits and intimate snapshots, from school, camp and ...”

“... To read some of this work, you would think that the worst thing to happen to Ireland wasn’t the Black and Tans but heteronormativity. The most advanced thinkers in the Handbook regard same-sex marriage as suspect, a mode of homonormativity that pinkwashes neoliberalism and makes corporate power look progressive (think Leo Varadkar). With normativity being ...”

“... of the book, all layers of imperial society have been included in the tale; its gifted translator, Michael Hofmann (who has done more than any other living translator to bring us Joseph Roth in English), nicely calls it ‘a fairy story that has swallowed a novel’. The fable begins with an official visit to Vienna, sometime in the late 19th century, by the ...”

“... of a ‘national crisis’. On 1 April 1996, the Monday of Easter week, the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, made a surprise statement full of foreboding about imminent IRA violence and the need for immediate legislation to prevent it. Various lacunae in the law had been discovered which it was now suddenly deemed essential to fill. Naturally, having ...”

“... out to be a writer of no necessary distinction, a former star, reduced now to the status of a ‘black hole’. By the middle of the 20th century, firmly in the possession of research-minded professors and the staple of many of their careers, Shakespeare appeared to speak only the patois of Modernism. As intimate with foreign cultures as Joyce, as widely ...”