“... would go on to have thirteen Rolls-Royces and many houses. His gold medal is now owned by Michael Flatley.If I am on the road to the airport, and getting ready to be an Irish writer abroad, I might think of Seamus Heaney, who lived near the strand, and once joked that his family only saw him walk it when he had a film crew in tow. This cluster ...”

“... on the cricket field goes unpunished. Warne tends to agree with them. Many other players – from Michael Atherton to Sachin Tendulkar – have been accused of messing around with the ball and got away with it. Some, like the South Africans Faf du Plessis and Vernon Philander, have been penalised for ball-tampering without, as Warne says, being ‘vilified ...”

“... But his collective observations of his jailers – especially the prison’s racial dynamics, with white guards dominating their black colleagues, and a Puerto Rican contingent showing the most sympathy to the jailed – are some of the book’s most striking details. (The broad outline of the abuses Slahi suffered, even the worst ones, has been a matter of ...”

“... on this), whose triumphant entry into Jerusalem she would accompany as his ‘Queen’, riding a white horse and up to her waist ‘in blood’. Hence the dominant image of her as ‘poor mad Hester’. Successive biographers – and there have been a number of them, though curiously Kirsten Ellis doesn’t mention the last and best, Lorna Gibb – have ...”

“... Most of the politicians now in power are ‘the same warlords and murderers’, as Archbishop Michael Francis told me last year. According to the Accra guidelines, sitting politicians are not allowed to stand for election, but there have already been shameless manoeuvrings. ‘People come here and shake my hand,’ Klein says, ‘and they say they want to ...”

“... on which he’d been elected, and to find a way of blaming it on others. It was decided to send Michael Armacost, an old China hand in both Democratic and Republican Administrations, to conduct the final obsequies. Armacost, indeed, refused to take on the mission ‘unless there was a consensus that the human rights linkage was going to be jettisoned. He ...”

“... we see again in such supposedly political works as Frears’s later Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo, both of which juxtapose heartless Tory soundbites and the images of desolation which contradict them. Political disagreement is reduced to the level of schoolyard naughtiness. Another notable species of flawed ...”

“... Nature has served as a revolutionary concept in its day, while from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott the notion of culture has been for the most part a conservative one. When the political regimes of 18th-century Europe heard the word nature, they reached for their cultural privileges. The notion that everything is cultural, including the Andes ...”

“... and studiously avoids political controversy. The book expands on a pair of articles (written with Michael Levi) in Foreign Affairs, which argued that recent fluctuations in the price of oil marked the end of a period of relative stability that began in the late 1970s. The first piece ran in 2011, when the yearly average price of Brent crude exceeded $100 for ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... be possible to recover the dinosaur’s DNA from blood cells in the mosquito’s stomach.A young Michael Crichton visited Poinar and Hess and peppered them with questions. His first attempt to use what he’d learned was a screenplay about a graduate student who recreated a pterosaur; after several redrafts he ended up with Jurassic Park (1990), in which a ...”

“... of real-life American stand-ups who’ve spectacularly scuttled their own careers (Louis C.K., Michael Richards), but the veniality of Manny’s ‘emotional misconduct’ (he slept with each of his accusers once, proposed marriage, then never called) suggests we’re not to dwell too much on them. Bordas wants to give him the trappings of disgrace without ...”

“... in Rome and supplying them with cash.One of his jokes involved an escapee British general, Michael Gambier-Parry, who was renowned as a forger. O’Flaherty took him to Irish parties and introduced him to senior German officers as an Irish doctor. Gambier-Parry found safe lodgings with a group of nuns, the Blue Sisters.Another figure who aided those ...”

“... a good mood and the last two customers – this was the final table of the evening – were mature white gays. I wasn’t sure if they were a couple, but you always want to flirt a bit, fan them, feed them grapes: a wronged queen will out-Karen any Karen any day. I went through the specials. ‘Still, sparkling or tap?’ ‘Glass of champagne?’ ‘Any ...”

“... report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in schools’ – a necessary move, according to Lord Nash, the schools ...”