“... it appears, no longer holds any interest for him. Still, before Brian Moore, whom do we have? Michael McLaverty, perhaps, with his adroit unclouded prose and unabashed simplicity: ‘At the top of the mountain they lay in the heather and gazed at Belfast spread out in the flat hollow below them, its lean mill chimneys stretched above the haze of ...”

“... the second still a schoolgirl in 1939, with her front hair rolled into a sausage shape, at their white-brick cottage in Great Sindon, Essex. Augmenting these recollections are some pieces of research work by an author engaged in examining the Hillyard case. The Sindon household to which Faith becomes attached is pretty odd, what with querulous, prickly ...”

“... part, but the real situation is little short of a creeping nationalisation of local government by White-hall – by the Treasury in particular. The Daily Express last year published a cartoon showing ‘Red Ken’ digging the grave of democracy, but the whole bizarre, impudent, exhilarating history of his administration at County Hall shows that he and his ...”

“... Williams), only two (named) amateurs have been deemed worthy of representation in the show: John White Abbott, the remarkably faithful imitator of his teacher Francis Towne, and the Reverend William Gilpin, who merits such exceptional treatment solely on account of his work as a leading theorist of the picturesque (in fact, Gilpin didn’t produce ...”

“... Two people I knew have died: Maurice Berger, an art critic, curator and civil rights activist; and Michael Sorkin, the radical architect and critic. A friend at the Whitney told me of a staff member in his late forties, a father of two, who had died of the virus.The pain of social distancing and isolation isn’t negligible, but neither is it lethal, and in ...”

“... isn’t clear that British politicians appreciated these nuances, though some officials, including Michael Oatley, the MI6 man on the ground, certainly did. The principal IRA objective was an invitingly lowish hurdle, and should have been seen as such: ‘an acknowledgment of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from ...”

“... 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 to the ...”

“... All were born within a few years of each other. All are suitably telegenic. All are male and white and Oxbridge. If all three formed a coalition together, one would not at present be too surprised. Where are the new sorts of political actor? Where, crucially, are the really new political ideas? Linda Colley For the first time in my voting life, I ...”

“... The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo and Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana White. I sought out novels and short stories that feature hoarders (Gogol’s Dead Souls, in which Stepan Plyushkin ‘fishes’ in his village for worthless things; Virginia Woolf’s ‘Solid Objects’, in which a young man gives up a promising parliamentary ...”

“... than once, the claim that science is non-political is itself a political claim.Baker was joined by Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian-born, Manchester-based physical chemist turned anti-positivist philosopher of science. Through the CCF’s Paris office, the CIA approached Polanyi with the proposal that he edit an occasional newsletter, Science and ...”

“... it lawyers alone who sustain the cult. In his Bancroft Prize-winning book, Arming America (2000), Michael Bellesiles, a historian at Emory University in Georgia, dared to challenge the view that the widespread possession of firearms in the mid-18th century had underpinned the success of the movement for independence, and found members of the National Rifle ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... intricate, delicate, perfect, breakable – ‘I lay them out in nice sentences, all my clean, white bones.’ They are what is inside things; what props them up. The Gathering moves between now and the past, through Veronica’s experiences in the present day and her imaginings and foragings in her family’s history. In the present, she must go to the ...”

“... can recite the rosary of disused stations that used to be stops, and that now rewind in a blur of white lettering on blue enamel when we slice obliviously through them. Seeing Libramont take its place on a rail map that took in Sarajevo, Venice, Veliko Tarnovo, Cologne and Dubrovnik made me feel giddy, excited and not entirely comfortable. The world was a big ...”

“... idea associated with American chefs including Alice Waters and Dan Barber and food writers such as Michael Pollan. ‘I got stuck on the conjunction,’ Twilley writes. ‘What about the to?’ The farm-to-tablers drew attention to the disconnect between eaters and farmers. Twilley’s well-researched project is subtly and importantly different. She shows that ...”