“... Mazzetti, then a student at the Slade, made a film called Together, with her fellow artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi playing the main parts. She shot it in the bombed-out East End, which gaggles of children had made their territory; her camera catches the wild scrambling, dash and hurtle of scores of boys and girls playing together in the ...”

“... tumultuous war years and his final breakdown. The narrator, Irvine, is a sympathetic but reserved young doctor charged with Gurney’s care. The novel’s delicate counterpoint of psychiatrist and war-damaged poet invites comparison with Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991). But whereas Barker was concerned with the immediate ethical dilemma of returning ...”

“... sad. Kierkegaard, misunderstood or actively disapproved of by the whole family, had only his very young nephews to write to. In the winter of 1841-2, he writes to the children of his sister Nicoline Kristine: to Michael (three times), to Carl (three times) and to Sofie (once or twice); and to the children of his sister ...”

“... Policy Studies. These two books, by contrast, deal almost exclusively with Strachey’s politics. Michael Newman writes only briefly about Strachey’s private life, though he does reveal that young Charles Strachey, born at the height of his father’s revolutionary fervour, was promptly put down for Eton. Noel Thompson ...”

“... important affinity’ between Marvell and the ‘gifted group of Ulster poets: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon’ – poets surely very unlike the Member of Parliament for Hull. He asserts that ‘many of these are creatively grateful to Marvell,’ and then suggests, even more extravagantly, that ‘it is likely that there ...”

“... and Kegan Paul published The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, a Wagnerian epic in which history went to town in exuberant, zestful and flamboyant fashion. Understandably, the two volumes won immediate and widespread acclaim as a tour de force of entrepreneurial inspiration and editorial skill: ‘a study in ...”

“... was first published, in Paris, in ‘the early Thirties’, according to its English translator, Michael Henry Heim. It appeared in the émigré journal Numbers and shortly thereafter as a book; fifty years of oblivion later, a copy turned up in a second-hand bookshop and was translated into French, bringing overdue fame to its ...”

“... over his descendants and their spouses, a theme very valuable to dramatists, meant that in law a young husband and his wife were equal in subordination. The monastic urge to poverty and asceticism, conspicuous in some senatorial families in the fourth century, toned reconsideration of the senatorial concentration on the accumulation of wealth. Norse ...”

“... hundred thousand by the middle of the 16th century – and became wildly rich. This, in brief, is Michael Pye’s story of Antwerp’s ‘glory years’, a few fleeting decades when the city burned brightly as Europe’s most important commercial port.It had once been good to be a butcher. Now, it was better to be a merchant. Antwerp’s Beurs, which opened ...”

“... of a just wage and a just price necessarily have no application within those markets.’ As a young man he tried to marry Christianity and Marxism, an impossible task given their wildly different anthropologies. From a Christian point of view, the Marxist conception of human nature must look wishfully optimistic, as though all that was really wrong with ...”

“... in this, and indeed any biography – its author. As Gordon Craig transformed theatre design, so Michael Holroyd in 1967 revolutionised the writing of biography with Lytton Strachey, which extended the biographer’s reach from the public to the private, from the work to the man, from the study to the bedroom. In doing so, he breached the border between the ...”

“... about the frustrations of caring for her two sons, and for Ted, who contracted hepatitis as a young man. ‘Three Postpartum Exercises’ begins: ‘Do you mean your response to pain is rage?/yes/and also hatred.’Notley’s father died in 1975; Ted in 1983; her beloved stepdaughter, Kate, in 1987; and her brother the following year. Beginning with a ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”

“... of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin. As for London and Scottish Marine Oil’s Chris ...”

“... many suggestions he made that evening was that, when I was in Dublin again, I should go and see Michael Yeats, the son of the poet, who might be glad to meet someone who was interested in his grandfather as much as his father – and to spend time with someone who was brought up, as I was, in a Fianna Fáil family (Fianna Fáil being at the time the main ...”