“... him that he was afraid to write. ‘Of what am I afraid?’ Sheridan asked. ‘You are afraid,’ Michael Kelly replied, ‘of the author of The School for Scandal.’ It is the kind of thing that people say to writers who have stopped writing and chosen to do something more immediately practical in the world. Chedzoy quotes the London Evening Post of 8 May ...”

“... arrived in Buenos Aires, hoping to fly on across the Andes, there was good news and bad. Michael Brunson and John Humphrys had hired a large plane from Aerolineas Argentinas, on behalf of ITN and the BBC, and they were leaving for Santiago late that night. The new Chilean authorities had promised to open the frontier the following morning, and for a ...”

“... manufactured mythology even as it built itself on the ruins of the Communist counter-culture. Michael Denning, in his long interpretative history The Cultural Front, has questioned this disdain. His notion of the culture of the Popular Front embraces sturdy proletarian sagas like Mike Gold’s Jews without Money and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath ...”

“... Tsar, Alexander III, “Majesty, if it were possible to drown the six or seven million Jews in the Black Sea, I would be absolutely in favour of that. But if it is not possible, one must let them live.’” Witte’s reasoning was that the Jews were poor, therefore filthy, therefore rightly loathed by the Russians, who had better allow the Jews to prosper a ...”

“... for a brief geography lesson by the BBC’s defence correspondent, an ex-admiral, over a map. Michael Peacock, our editor, had decided to lead the programme with George Mikes’s Hungarian report. The management – in the person of the formidable, unforgettable Grace Wyndam-Goldie, a kind of pre-incarnation of Margaret Thatcher – thought ...”

“... over so much of our lives to this crap: we turn on Baywatch, we buy tickets to Eraser, we christen Michael Jackson the King of Pop and indulge him in his public psychosis (except for Jarvis Cocker, bless his heart). If our actions were involuntary – if, say, Home Improvement was forced on us in the same way that the two-minute hate was forced on the ...”

“... scene. One of my strongest memories of the Mall was of something absolutely untypical: an elderly black woman singing hymns in a cracked voice without regard for anyone else. She was singing for Diana alone. More typically, almost every bouquet was accompanied by a card, letter or poem. There was some surprise that the flowers were left in paper or ...”

“... time of the general election in April 1992, at which Major squeaked home for another term. When Black Wednesday came in September, the forcible ejection of sterling from the ERM was, by rights, as much a refutation of Labour’s official policy as of the government’s; but this time it was the Conservatives who suffered as the party of devaluation. Had ...”

“... York’, expresses his familiar apocalyptic sensibility, suggesting that New York has become a ‘black utopia’, a place where skyscrapers collapse into infernos and the repressed roots of urban fear return with spectacular fury. ‘It’s conceivable that bin Laden et al have put a silver stake in the heart of the “downtown revival” in New York and ...”

“... war and peace are questions of life and death. Not the death of some or even many people, but as Michael Walzer proposes in Arguing about War, the ‘moral as well as physical extinction’ of an entire people. True, it is only rarely that a nation will find its ‘ongoingness’ – its ability ‘to carry on, and also to improve on, a way of life handed ...”

“... it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”

“... to this London post-punk scene of an international idea of what an avant-garde might be,’ Michael Bracewell explained to Kraus. Acker explored the roots of her own subculture, and the roots of those roots too: Burroughs took her to Genet, who took her to the French and anti-French traditions, both homegrown and that of the anti-colonial ...”

“... hand, were the crowning glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster reproduced in Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton’s collection shows the great hulk of the ship, sunlit, belching smoke out of three of its four funnels – the fourth was there only for effect – and cutting a swathe between a small sailing ship and a three-masted square ...”