“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... heart was in it. In his entertaining colonial service autobiography A Mole in the Crown, Michael Carritt describes working under Anderson when he became Governor of Bengal in the mid-1930s. He had been sent to Bengal as a strongman, a trouble-shooter, to cope with a quick succession of terrorist assassinations and an increase in Indian nationalist ...”

“... of them rather whiskered but both of them rather well-made. He summarises the style of his guru Michael Oakeshott, who he met as a brother officer in the course of a fairly undemanding war. Worsthorne seems to have intuited all or most of Oakeshott’s elegant resignation about politics and action from his view (derived allegedly from the Iron Duke) that ...”

“... of randomness, as at the end of La Grande Illusion, when the two French soldiers, dressed in black, are trudging up a snow-covered mountain, their awkward movements apparently choreographed in a kind of counterpoint? Or is it in the spaces he leaves for us to fill in, what Truffaut calls ‘un travail semi-improvisé, volontairement ...”

“... in the holes with speculation and gossip. She ‘hears’ that the Duchess is said to have turned black as a prune. It was always ‘said’ that the Duchess picked up her most exciting sexual skills while travelling in the Orient. These snippets she blithely records as if her duty as journalist did not extend beyond reproducing hearsay. About Maître ...”

“... Tennessee, founded by her friend, Fanny Wright. What Wright had in mind was a commune in which black and white children would be educated together in a Temple of Science. The Nashoba community also advocated the practice of free or ‘rational’ love. Mrs Trollope’s views on this and other aspects of the Nashoba programme, and the degree of her ...”

“... of a new round of ‘affirmative action’ in sectors of the economy designed to accommodate black South Africans. Be that as it may, Coetzee’s father’s loss of his job, the family’s subsequent move to Worcester, about a hundred miles north of Cape Town, along with the parents’ decision to have the boy educated in English, the language of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I went to see London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Ballet Rambert at the Oxford Apollo and one of Michael Clark’s earliest forays at the Museum of Modern Art, barebottomed in Bodymap and long sleeves. There wasn’t much more than that going on in London but they did get Merce Cunningham at Sadler’s Wells every now and again, and that was a revelation. I ...”

“... of ‘clerico-fascist’ vipers. (One member of Cowling’s Peterhouse caucus was said to sport a black armband on the anniversary of Franco’s death.) For much of the 1980s Cowling and Trevor-Roper would engage in a ‘long-running and increasingly public slanging-match’, which, as Jonathan Parry notes in The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Beowulf in the late 1940s; it was first published in 1952. Recent versions by Seamus Heaney and Michael Alexander might have made the need for the republication of Morgan’s less urgent for anyone who just wants to get hold of a good modern Beowulf, but as an early and defining Morgan poem it remains indispensable. First of all, the poem is a ...”

“... for cinematography – and the scene is much the most powerful in the film. It almost makes Michael Nyman’s hyperbolic score (the music in Planet of the Apes is subtle by comparison) tolerable. In all such scenes of epiphany (Charlton Heston breaking down at the sight of the half-buried Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes is ...”