“... North Korea that would stun the world, of cruelties equal to or surpassing those of Kolyma and the White Sea Canal in Stalin’s time.’ He is probably right. Mao’s demented tyranny in China concealed unbearable pain, which foreigners had little or no idea of how to perceive, let alone decode. Yet the degree of control and concealment in North Korea is ...”

“... cases.’ The dilemma facing indigenous members of the security forces is well described by Michael Asher, a former soldier in the Parachute Regiment who also served in the SASTA and in the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Patrol Group. In his book Shoot to kill he explains the motivation of RUC officers: Most RUC men were scrupulously honest. They ...”

“... motion to be made standing between him and his taking of the oath.’ The leader of the House, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, rose to object. The speaker silenced him, reminding him that Hicks-Beach had himself not yet taken the oath. And that was the end of it. What is so remarkable is that Bradlaugh took the oath, which is precisely what he had sought not to do at ...”

“... upheavals – were linked, and should be treated in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved ...”

“... Reagan debates. In 1988, mounted on a concealed ‘pitcher’s mound’ to conceal his shortness, Michael Dukakis took on George Bush’s viciously conservative campaign in their first debate (‘Of course the vice-president is questioning my patriotism … and I resent it’), only to confirm his reputation as ‘metronome man’ with an icy answer to a ...”

“... When Polanyi arrived in London in 1934, he struggled to find work. He had hoped that his brother, Michael, a distinguished physical chemist who had been recruited by the University of Manchester after the Nazis’ rise to power, would give him an entrée, but their relationship was strained. He wrote The Great Transformation during a sabbatical as a resident ...”

“... City of God seems to have become the Left’s new paradigm of social change. In Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, Augustine provides the model for a counter-empire in which ‘the divine city is a universal city of aliens, coming together, co-operating, communicating.’ And even Slavoj Žižek, who complains that ‘in today’s critical and ...”

“... man has no ready buttress for his self-regard. That historian is fictional: he is the narrator of Michael Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. But the only thing significantly off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them. Mount’s Uppers do, broadly speaking, think ...”

“... century has Staphylococcus aureus, as MRSA, attracted much attention from British politicians. Michael Howard’s mother-in-law died from a hospital infection and he made its control an issue in the 2005 general election campaign. Risk theorists say that top-level support for safety spending is much greater for air travel than for oil refineries because ...”

“... In​ Peeping Tom (1960), Michael Powell’s brutal parable on the nature of film, a woman confronts a young cameraman, Mark, in his darkroom. Mrs Stephens, who is blind, realises there’s something disturbing about Mark, something linked to his compulsive filmmaking. ‘I’m listening to my instinct now. And it says: “All this filming isn’t healthy ...”

“... wave’ science fiction, a quasi-modernist movement centred on New Worlds and figures such as Michael Moorcock, who took over from Carnell as the magazine’s editor in 1964, and M. John Harrison, who became its literary editor in 1968.Ballard’s own fiction was by then moving into its second major phase. This followed a second life-defining trauma. In ...”

“... motives. Celebrities are particularly self-serving in this regard. In his essay ‘The Birth of White Saviour Imagery’, Wainaina’s ‘how to’ becomes a caustic ‘how not to’: ‘You should avoid picking up random children you do not know for a photo that you then publish online … no matter how cute or how poor they are.’ In ‘Why Do Western ...”

“... the saints who visited her, when, for instance, she was pressed at her trial to specify whether St Michael wore wings or not. What Miss Warner emphasises, however, is that her experience was not of mystical rapture, but had a mundane, realistic bearing: she was being instructed to leave Domrémy and undertake a mission for her bleeding country, and this ...”

“... Boy’, ‘Old Cumberland Beggar’), and in 1800 (‘The Brother’, ‘Home at Grasmere’, ‘Michael’), and would do so again in ‘The Waggoner’ of 1806, but in the periods that produced the great poetry of imagination (late 1798 and 1799, 1802, 1804-5), true fellow-feeling is very rare. The Prelude has its moments – Ann Tyson asleep on her bible ...”

“... rose into triple figures. Successively onto the scene came such butch illuminati as Miller, Michael Frayn and Peter Cook, with results that Mr Hewison obviously finds it much less uncomfortable to write about, even if it simultaneously becomes more difficult to trace the thread. These were and are real individuals, less easily subsumed into a ...”