“... within the rich cultures and subcultures of agitation in and out of doors. In the light of this, Michael Duffy, as general editor of this series, has rightly decided that a substantial explanatory introduction was needed for each volume and he has assembled a first-rate team of historians to address such problems. Several have interpreted their brief as ...”

“... in a post-war DP camp, where Stanislaw is forced to witness his wife’s execution, and young Rudi is imprisoned in a hole in the ground – a horror from which he never recovers. The surviving Kabbels emigrate to Australia. Essentially stateless, they fill the political emptiness of their lives with apocalyptic mysticism. Convinced that a purifying ...”

“... is instructive to compare it with that masterpiece of invention, Larkin’s poem on looking at a young girl’s photograph album.’ The comparison isn’t made, so the instruction is hypothetical, but Bayley’s general patience is clarified by what it has to put up with in Ashbery’s Shadow Train. Bayley has defended his criteria in several other ...”

“... one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.’This realisation, as Michael Lewis recounts in The Undoing Project, his story of the intellectual partnership of Kahneman and Tversky, had an important effect on Kahneman’s work, and on his and Tversky’s efforts to overturn some of the basic assumptions of 20th-century social ...”

“... smitten with the rackety self-destruction of Zevon’s life (terrified of doctors, dying all too young), and cherishes the howling poetry of his lyrics. The Q whom Specktor kissed had once been involved with Zevon, and Specktor asked her: ‘Did you ever forgive him?’ She looks at him and ponders, like a Tuesday Weld close-up: ‘I never thought of it that ...”

“... was no room for half measures. Compromise with an idol was a denial of God. In The Idolatrous Eye, Michael O’Connell tackles a more difficult question: why did the Puritans believe not just religious but all forms of theatre to be idolatrous? It’s not difficult to see why they disapproved of the great cycles of religious drama. Although the cycles were ...”

“... also describes less bookish figures. There is his sketch, for instance, of the odd career of Michael de Freitas, aka Michael X, one of the great London rogues of the 1960s. After profiting as one of Rachman’s rent-collectors in the 1950s, he became a West London drugs baron and then, under his new name, head of the ...”

“... was accompanied by a widespread fascination with ‘Gypsies’ in popular culture. Klaus-Michael Bogdal, a professor of German literature at the University of Bielefeld at the time of the riots, was struck by the contradiction. In the early 1990s, Germans were taking up flamenco lessons. The French-Gitano band Gipsy Kings was hitting the top of the ...”

“... shortage of actual instances of articulate unbelief. This intriguing paradox lies at the heart of Michael Hunter’s book, which combines lightly revised versions of his previously published essays with newly written chapters to advance a distinctive argument about the significance of atheism in England and Scotland before the Enlightenment. Building on his ...”

“... futile’. He was what is now known as an abuser. He derived sexual pleasure from causing pain to young boys, especially by smacking their bare buttocks. All the boys at School House, Shrewsbury, knew of this abuse. The identities of Trench’s special victims were also well known. Peel quotes the then headmaster of Shrewsbury, Jack Peterson, describing the ...”

“... Romanisation. The policy didn’t go far enough, however, to satisfy the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Founded in 1927, the Legion advocated a spiritually reborn, fully Romanian nation. Religious fervour and support for the Orthodox Church were a crucial part of its message. Violence was also essential. The Legion’s paramilitary branch, appropriately ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... over and over: obedience bitch, limit bitch, postgraduate bitch, this magnificent young bitch from Venice, this famous bitch from America.As a televised spectacle, though, Crufts is essentially comprehensible, organised around familiar rules. The presenters are the same ones who do the Olympics. The agility competitions work along similar ...”

“... Admiral Horthy to Szalasi in Hungary and Marshal Antonescu to the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania. Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian pro-Nazi whose name became a synonym for collaborationism, was excluded from power for most of the first 22 months of German occupation. Hitler sensibly preferred to rule through influential local notables rather ...”

“... Benetton-Ford, Ferrari and what is now McLaren-Peugeot, had been catching up. And Benetton had Michael Schumacher, ten years younger and the one driver whose talent was now close to Senna’s own. Senna was openly anxious at the start of the year. He went out of the first two races in incidents that could have been caused by nerves. He was the only driver ...”