“... the more provocative he becomes. The quotes about the IRA, the Royal Wedding, gay rights and black pride continue to flow; his wretched Labour group on the GLC have often paid the price, pockmarked by the shower of missiles aimed at their leader and obliged to watch many of their most ‘popular’ measures obliterated from view by the latest scandal ...”

“... response I find a strain, Suspecting that this pontiff talks hot air And only got the part when Michael Caine Turned cold on the long frocks he’d have to wear. But thousands of young Catholics seemed delighted As if he were the Beatles reunited. Without fail each rock-concert-sized crowd Goes mad while the old boy lays down the law. It seems that birth ...”

“... gets between these stories and our complete enjoyment of them: there’s no element of parody or black comedy in the situations Ruth Rendell envisages, not even when it comes to a man’s obsession with a dress-shop dummy, which leads him to act peculiarly in a basement. Why should there be, she might ask, when her theme is criminal derangement and the forms ...”

“... that is given of the son’s avant-gardism. Having gone for a prevailing, historically appropriate black-and-white, Reitz himself is avant-garde enough to fleck the film with colour as a heightening for critical moments. In the context of the film at large, however, these dabs and flecks could be thought an alien feature – caviare to the general, Stockhausen ...”

“... If​ universities had been an invention of the second half of the 20th century,’ Michael Dummett wondered in his last book, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), ‘would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied?’ Dummett’s anxiety wasn’t whether philosophy could survive at a time when the value of a university education is gauged in increasingly reductive, economic terms ...”

“... organised charity concerts, a sleep-out in front of the Home Office, and managed to secure the QC Michael Mansfield’s services pro bono. By and large, the campaign was a success: it brought the pair home. Their names were never cleared, but their sentences were reduced at appeal, and they were not sent back to prison after the hearing. Some of Masters’s ...”

“... betide Neil Kinnock or Roy Hattersley if he turns out to be a quintessentially decent fellow like Michael Foot. Churchill was not altogether decent, otherwise he would have been a lesser man. Gilbert records his magnanimous gestures, such as the considerate letters written to the dying Neville Chamberlain, or the glorious episode of the Bovril and ...”

“... Meanwhile Stalin, suffering from toothache, sits on the verandah of his dacha in Sochi on the Black Sea, rewriting the history of the Bolshevik underground in Baku, and brooding on the ‘technology of power’: ‘A state apparatus that is a reliable executor of the supreme will must be kept in a state of fear. That fear will then be passed on to the ...”

“... Wilson. The greater the distance from which human life is seen, the more like a certain kind of black comedy it tends to look. Updike has praised the ‘sublime hard-heartedness’ of Waugh’s fiction, and contrasted it favourably with the ‘claustrophobically human’ universe of Kingsley Amis. There is something of that hard-heartedness about S.. A ...”

“... the Princess of Wales are of great moment to young Saudi women. Even the censors, with their big black felt-tips, have been known to spare the royal decolletage; the Princess shares with the Empress Maria Theresa, whose image graced the old silver coinage, the distinction of being the only bared bosom on view. As a matter of honour, arms, legs and faces must ...”

“... Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ‘centre’. In a book with the same title, For Love of Country, Maurizio Viroli offers further, more sustained reflections on ...”

“... optimism -‘cheerfulness in the bunker’ – before polling day in the 1874 General Election. ‘Michael Foot might have said it during the 1983 campaign’ is a cheeky aside, given that Jenkins evidently expects his readers to remember who was in which bunker at the relevant moment. There is more to Gladstone, however, than politics. His restless energy ...”

“... W.G. Sebald (say), whereas really it is Vertigo, a version of Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle. by Michael Hulse. In the Belfast poems, the movement of words from one place or voice to another is a focus of attention. Carson encourages us to see that the slightest transposition matters. When he writes, ‘Spokesman for censored political party spoke in someone ...”

“... were funny; he describes a ‘concussion forum’ at Twickenham in 2013 at which a doctor called Michael Turner played videos of jockeys falling on their heads, to laughs. One strand of the book follows the story of Jeff Astle, a former professional footballer who developed early-onset dementia and whose family have since campaigned for awareness of the link ...”

“... and all-connecting to pause and magnify. He cites all the other clever British pop authorities – Michael Bracewell, Jon Savage, Simon Reynolds – while replicating their tendency to jump frustratingly between subjects and stiffen up their sentences with jargon. Haslam’s footnotes, interestingly, are much more relaxed and informative. Here he can just be ...”