“... policy in Iraq and Syria and an unsparing analysis of Shia politics in Baghdad. In their book Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan lean much further towards Filiu’s thesis, that the rise of IS can be blamed in large part on the Assad regime, and they devote a chapter to the dealings between the Syrian intelligence services and Sunni jihadi groups in Iraq. I ...”

“... some of the medical history that was being published in the Eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me The Royal Malady by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s illness and the so-called Regency Crisis. I also ...”

“... qualified they are to identify suspects in need of psychiatric help. The Crown Court study by Michael Zander and Paul Henderson was of value precisely because it gave us the opinions of all the principal participants in all the cases which went through the Crown Court within the period of the study; if, as some people have argued, the right inference to ...”

“... published in English as Anatomy of the SS State, and Uwe Adam’s Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich. Michael Marrus’s and Robert Paxton’s study of Vichy France now fills one important gap, while Randolph Braham’s new two-volume work on The Holocaust in Hungary, massively detailed, covering every aspect of the ...”

“... would later tell people that Lytton Strachey was wrong to say that Brooke had ‘bandy legs’; in Michael Holroyd’s biography James sides with his brother: ‘Rupert had bandy legs, all the same.’) This was, as Delany writes, the high summer of Neo-Paganism: Brooke read Paradise Lost to his admirers high in a chestnut tree; canoed down the river at ...”

“... clicks, which Eno put together on the days Bowie had to go into Paris for legal wrangles with Michael Lippman, the lawyer-manager he’d hired to disentangle himself from Defries, and had since fallen out with. His relationship with Angie, which had been essentially over for years, but kept on ice as long as they weren’t seeing each other, was heading ...”

“... filming in Ilkley. Nothing untoward occurred until the evening, when I was taken out to supper by Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. Came my salad of mixed leaves and there, nestling among the rocket, were several shards of broken glass. ‘Very mixed,’ said Miss Smith. ‘No,’ said the waiter. ‘It’s a mistake.’ I reached the 1990s without ...”

“... Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol (the future godfather of neoconservatism) and the cultural observer Robert Warshow, whose essays on the movie Western and gangster films would become anthology classics and whose personal mystique resembled James Agee’s without the all-night jags. When Warshow asks Podhoretz out to lunch, ‘I felt as a girl with a secret ...”

“... his superhuman consumption of Player’s, and all the benzedrine, could hardly have helped. But Michael Davidson, an early mentor, was not alone in seeking a more symbolic explanation and in seeing ‘those singular corrugations’ as the ‘seismic result of terrific intellectual commotion’. Auden seemed in later years to have been encased behind a great ...”

“... Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to the consumer DNA tests and paywalled online databases of today. Genealogy became ...”

“... According to this line of reasoning – proclaimed in Hungary by Viktor Orbán, in Slovakia by Robert Fico, in Germany by the nationalist leftist Sahra Wagenknecht and the pro-Russian AfD, and in the US by sub-Trumps like Vivek Ramaswamy – Putin’s invasion was merely regrettable (though Trump himself called the first stage of the attack ...”

“... military assertion over diplomacy. ‘The most likely outcome of the war,’ according to Robert Malley, one of Obama’s negotiators in the JCPOA, ‘will be a situation of no war, no peace, more unilateral strikes.’ Iran will hunker down, focus on regime maintenance and hope for a better deal, while Israel will strike at Iran whenever it sees the ...”

“... power? Runciman is not alone in thinking they can. The same assumption can be found in the work of Michael Mann, of which Runciman has been a severe critic, but whose scale and focus invite comparison. The common source of this bias is Weber – the dominant influence on this cohort of British sociologists. Fixation with power has, of course, gone much further ...”

“... Craftsman, the principal organ of the Opposition as it tried to bring down the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole’. This is described as potentially ‘by far the most exciting’ discovery, though the only evidence reported in the biography is that a correspondent to another paper once said that he had ‘overheard Amhurst’, editor of the ...”

“... of what the EU had become. Once the campaign began, two of his leading cabinet ministers – Michael Gove the slyest and Boris Johnson the most popular of his colleagues, neither of them close to the ERG, both actuated by career rather than conviction – declared themselves for Leave.In parliamentary terms, Remain still had a winning hand, since ...”