“... bad it looked on the surface, it was even worse behind the scenes. The long-standing Trump-watcher Michael Wolff, who positioned himself as tittle-tattle-in-chief during those years, wrote a series of books – Fire and Fury, Siege, Landslide – describing the endless tantrums, dressings down and sulks that took place inside the Oval Office. No one was safe ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the tests for another six weeks. ‘In any case,’ he pointed out, ‘at least 20 per cent of all black 18-year-old girls are HIV positive already and that figure is rising rapidly towards 30 per cent. She could have been HIV positive before the attack.’ I told him I didn’t think so: I have lectured Josephine endlessly on the perils of Aids since she was ...”

“... danger, from which they were saved only by his death seven years later. Our author and his son Michael were born in the safety of South Africa and England only because the rabbi’s untimely demise left a penniless widow and nine children with no means of support and no choice but to emigrate. Of course, Heshel could not have known what was coming, and ...”

“... racism ‘was likely to have been an influencing factor’ in the strip-searching last year of a Black teenage girl wrongly suspected of carrying cannabis at school. In November, an inspection report found that a culture of ‘misogyny, sexism, predatory behaviour towards female police officers and staff and members of the public’ was ‘prevalent’ in ...”

“... applications for clemency awaited his decision. Among the applicants, it is reported, were Conrad Black; Michael Milken, of junk bond fame; John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’; a former Republican congressman jailed for accepting bribes; and a former Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on racketeering ...”

“... they face unpleasant questions from the US Department of Commerce.But,​ as Matthew Klein and Michael Pettis argue in their brilliant polemic Trade Wars Are Class Wars, industrial policy instruments are only part of the story. The more fundamental reason for the Sino-American trade imbalance is macroeconomic. When we look at the world economy as a whole ...”

“... Europe made it impossible for him to keep the faith. Recollections vary, however. According to Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College remember the young Nigel being more hard-right than centre-right, closer to the National Front than he was even to the outer fringes of the Tory mainstream. They say he was a ...”

“... to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in the first place. Perhaps ...”