“... is unmasked he should turn out to be ... other critics. The first to be identified is our own Frank Kermode, whose argument in his 1973 Eliot lectures, The Classic, is in two sentences of the second lecture neatly travestied and so dismissed. He survives to fight another day, as we shall see. The next antagonist, in a third lecture called ‘Shakespeare ...”

“... of Christianity has become merely vestigial. The complexities of the situation are endless. Michael Ramsey set out on his journey to this perilous office in 1904, as the son of a Cambridge mathematics don. His mother had been educated at Oxford – early days for such a distinction though those were, for a woman – and was a suffragette and a ...”

“... their media-men (like most British media-men) lean towards the SDP and they point to the fact that Michael Foot’s huge overflow meeting attracted less press wonder and applause than Shirley Williams’s. But to a Londoner, these local papers seem pretty fair and accurate – stating but not overstating the obvious fact, recognised by the Telegraph papers in ...”

“... was an accommodating Old Etonian called Jim Shelley. Their commercial property manager was Michael Hutchings, a young eccentric known as ‘the man with the golden nose’ – a reference not only to his ability to sniff out a nice little earner in the property market, but also to his highly-developed taste for wine. Hutchings loved travel and his work ...”

“... treatment of persons. Among its heroes are Isaiah Berlin and, with a good deal of qualification, Michael Oakeshott; on the Left there is the author’s contemporary Eric Hobsbawm. Others’ heroes – Raymond Williams, for instance – are sometimes harshly dismissed (‘a nonconformist spellbinder, rhetorical, evasive and vacuous’). These judgments are ...”

“... Projects Committee, which had nominal powers to dispense tiny sums to popular forms of art. Michael Astor and I spent much time examining claims on these funds, mostly on behalf of projects the Chairman knew a priori to be rubbish. He was never to be found, as we were, along with Coldstream and Hugh Willatt, the Secretary-General, penetrating the ...”

“... of all Scots’, so there is some excuse for me. On the other hand most of us have heard of Michael Miliken, of whose Law-like career Buchan offers a vivid sketch. He could ‘create money with a single sentence’, his salary in 1986 was $550 million, which, on the Buchan-approved capitalisation model of Sir William Petty (20 times one’s annual ...”

“... explained in a battery of notes. The most interesting of these comes from the Australian critic Michael Wilding, a distinguished exponent of Marvell, who eliminates some earlier commentary by pointing out that the apples in ll. 23-40 were certainly not pineapples, for pineapples don’t grow on trees. The poem has 40 lines, maybe three hundred words, and ...”

“... Michael Andrews was born in 1928 and died in 1995. He didn’t produce many paintings (although the ones he made tended to be large). In the exhibition at Tate Britain until 17 October the full range of his work can be appreciated for the first time. Andrews followed a route which depersonalises the act of looking ...”

“... of the country, according to the freely expressed desires of the people concerned’; but as Frank Lindsay puts it, ‘those of us who lived with the day-to-day vilification by both sides of the other as traitors, and the increasing tempo of their civil war ... couldn’t see how the people would be able to freely express their desires for a post-war ...”

“... landscape: this is what Johnny Foreigner is doing, take it or leave it. That’s what shows in Frank O’Hara’s great poem of 1959, ‘The Day Lady Died’, when he buys himself a hamburger and a malted and ‘an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days’. Subsequently, foreign titles had something of the status of ...”

“... power and cultural philanthropy, fed by oil revenues, set against backdrops provided by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas or Jean Nouvel. Though Rykwert mentions none of these architects by name, their work plainly lies behind his guiding assumption that the ‘privatisation’ of political and financial power in modern times has led to a wave ...”

“... are, of course, Irish, and yet they are queerly aligned, or disjointed, and sometimes irascibly. Michael Longley’s Irishness is more affirmed than Mahon’s, and it is enriched by the poets of the Roman Silver Age. There’s a tender lyricism in him, and a love of the Irish countryside, its people, customs, flowers and creatures. The Echo Gate is his ...”

“... Chère Humanité, won the Prix Apollo in 1976. In France, ‘Curval’s name is as well-known as Frank Herbert’s in America or Michael Moorcock’s in Britain.’ Brave Old World transports us to ‘Marcom’ – the EEC as it will have developed in the late 21st century. Britain is apparently still in. But since the ...”

“... the Government. Nor was this only because Prime Minister Blair and his jovial Health Secretary Frank Dobson had shrewdly chosen Homerton Hospital as an appropriate place for the announcement of the Government’s new health plans. Compared with their Tory predecessors, the New Labour lot seemed to my physiotherapist friend to be sensible, almost ...”