“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of human activity and contact, silting up in vast unchartable archives. In Repeated Takes, Michael Chanan has written a concise history of the technology that has wrought this change and the commercial and creative forces that have shaped it. His account is elegant and impressively well-informed. He ranges across the entire technical field, from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... editor. We had a committee consisting of John Fuller, Francis Hope, Martin Dodsworth, Colin Falck, Michael Fried and Gabriel Pearson. We never had meetings or anything like that. There was a lot of correspondence, because John went to Buffalo for a year. So he wrote to me a lot from there. And Michael and Colin had already ...”

“... spare, usually shorn of adverbs and adjectives, and her plots were similarly unencumbered. When Michael Chabon decries the tyranny of the ‘contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory short story – a.k.a. the New Yorker short story’, it’s Taylor who is probably to blame. She thought that dramatic situations were unnecessary: normal ...”

“... back to Bristol and stuck his head – ginger beard and curly hair – out of the window of his black Austin A40, yawning and moaning into the autumn night as he steered along the motorway. Surprisingly little has been written recently about birdwatching. For Mynott, the image of the old lady paying her sub to the RSPB, hanging out fat balls and talking to ...”

“... writings of the Church Fathers and biblical commentaries, he also had works by Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Montaigne, Petrarch, Tasso and Boccaccio. The earl of Leicester’s library at Penshurst included books in many languages on the latest in beekeeping, drainage, poetry, forestry, military strategy, heraldry, optics and surgery.Sometimes a ...”