“... most of the women in his life.Whatever reservations Larkin had about his parents (‘days spent in black, twitching, boiling HATE!!!’), by Oxford and adulthood they had modulated, says Motion, into ‘controlled but bitter resentment’. This doesn’t stop Larkin sending poems to his father (‘I crave / The gift of your courage and indifference’) and ...”

“... the ‘Men in White’ – has given way to an ever more circumscribed stratum, a process which Michael Barr, the leading historian of modern Singapore, examines in rich detail. The well-oiled pistons of the market-state are increasingly accompanied by the creaks and squabbles of a Chinese dynasty. The country’s prized state companies are overrun by ...”

“... on, but then skirts. The historical novel – if we except its one great precursor, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas – is a product of romantic nationalism. This is as true of Tolstoy as it is of Scott, Cooper, Manzoni, Galdós, Jókai, Sienkiewicz or so many others. The original matrix of this nationalism was the European reaction against Napoleonic ...”

“... in secondary schools and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these ...”

“... him to plays, after which they would repair to the ‘Dirty Duck’ (the pub was really called the Black Swan). Half a century later Knight recalled these jaunts as formative events, and hailed ‘the vivid imagery and trenchant critique’ of Chesterton’s pieces on Timon. ‘He could have been a very great power in dramatic criticism if things had gone that ...”

“... issue of the Harvard Law Review featured a remarkable example of cynical realism, written by Michael Klarman, another leading analyst of constitutional law. His article, ‘The Degradation of American Democracy – and the Court’, appeared as the foreword to the annual issue of the Review devoted to the previous year’s Supreme Court term. In what is ...”

“... than the paratactic. In a later phase of the Modernist endeavour this would be recognised, so that Michael Edwards (Of Making Many Books, 1990) can say of Charles Tomlinson – in my view, quite rightly: ‘Tomlinson’s syntax is what makes his poems, linguistically, what they are ... in the poetry of our century, Tomlinson enacts the revenge of ...”

“... of the emperor’s new clothes. For the handful of liberals – Lord Scarman, Anthony Lester, Michael Zander – who have been arguing for decades that we need to have our rights and the government’s powers written down and invigilated by independent judges, the Nineties are looking like the moment of truth. That they were right about the fragility of ...”

“... their left-wing views altogether chose not to return to the old militant methods. ‘For while the black-and-white, either-or approach to political art may have been artistically compelling, it proved ineffective and even dangerous with regard to politics itself.’ If the Left parties had been prepared to gloss over their differences they would have kept ...”

“... start turning a profit. The money invested by City businesses will turn to profit more quickly. As Michael Snyder, the Corporation’s head of policy, noted, Crossrail will stop the City from losing the £1 million a day it currently loses as a result of transport delays: one hundred and fifty days and the banks will be laughing all the way ...”

“... lived in the quasi-monastic style of an academic gypsy, kept a room in his house painted entirely black, and for many years seems to have survived on a diet consisting mostly of blondies (a chocolateless variant on the brownie). Max’s fixation with ‘normality’ (‘Wallace’s childhood was happy and ordinary’) is part of a popularising mission. He ...”

“... to Tbilisi, cheerfully teasing the KGB and breaking the rules by changing currency on the black market, selling their old clothes – and in Reddaway’s case distributing a few Bibles. When in due course Reddaway decided to become an academic specialising in the Soviet Union, his activist interests were at least as strong as his scholarly ones. He ...”

“... and disdainful Ganguly, particularly loathsome, whereas one gets the feeling that they reckon Michael Vaughan to be a thoroughly decent bloke – more or less one of their own. Cricket has undoubtedly gained hugely from the friendly rivalry of this Ashes series, particularly by way of comparison with other sports, above all football, which seems a ...”

“... shows Meloni organising a group of young activists, almost all men, in Garbatella. Wearing a black leather jacket, she tells the reporter in passable French that Mussolini had been a good politician because everything he did had been for Italy. Later in the clip, she appears under a poster declaring Mussolini ‘uomo del popolo’. Two years later she ...”

“... Yet justice demands that everyone be treated equally; such slogans as ‘I am a man’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ express this basic egalitarianism. The problem and the pain of love is that, for all of us, some people matter infinitely more than others.Any reckoning with the affective qualities of justice must also weigh the importance of more ...”