“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the Sixties rather than the Fifties. The evidence, however, is far from convincing. As Michael Banton points out, there has been some reduction between the Sixties and the Eighties in standard social-distance scores, measured as willingness or otherwise to accept black people as neighbours, friends, fellow workers. He regards this as a reason for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dean of the seminary, although he still hovered darkly in corridors. The new dean, Dr Ledwith, was young and friendly and open and very good-looking. He was also reputed to be really smart. One of my friends knew him from home so he often stopped to talk to us. He was a new breed of priest; he had studied in Europe and America. Many of the teaching priests ...”

“... DNC speakers so hard their heads would spin, particularly one ‘very little guy’, presumably Michael Bloomberg, who’d implied that Trump was insane and incompetent and could brag of becoming richer than Trump without the help of his father. To my ear the most effective attack on Trump was Joe Biden’s line that it was perverse to hand over the US ...”

“... in 1981 – it was a close-run thing, but it was also the closest he would ever get to the top. Michael Foot, the party leader, was facing the brute realities of the Falklands War and the defection of the so-called Gang of Four to the SDP. The Labour left wasn’t about to have power wrested from it. It was beginning to dribble away. The sense of nostalgia ...”

“... like the literary future, not just to Evelyn Waugh but to Rebecca West and Arnold Bennett – the young and the old alike – H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell. In his time Gerhardie was at least as potent a literary influence in England as Hemingway, and more pervasive, more part of the new metropolitan air that English authors ...”

“... 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 ...”