“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an attack on a German town the mayor of which was persuaded to organise a surrender. After the white flag went up an enemy tank opened fire, ‘so I shot the mayor and withdrew.’ Haines cites this as an example of the ruthlessness which enabled Max well to mention the incident ‘casually to his wife, without apparently wondering whether she might think ...”

“... almost have been put up by visiting aliens. Hillenbrand’s account of the remains of the Timurid White Palace at Shahr-i Sabz in particular provokes Volneyish thoughts about the ruin of empire: ‘Like some gigantic Ozymandias, a solitary iwan rears its vast and trunkless mass from out of the surrounding desolation. Indeed, one of its now vanished Persian ...”

“... red star from their caps. Not only that: they were flying the flag of the revolution – the red, white and green tricolour, with a jagged hole in the centre, where the Communist emblem, a hammer and wheat-sheaf, had been. Mikes had been a regular broadcaster in the BBC’s Hungarian Service for many years and the guards were among his listeners. Nothing was ...”

“... In a gloss on the snot riddle in his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Michael Thompson explains that the riddle succeeds by playing upon that which is residual to our system of cultural categories. When, in the context of wealth and poverty, we talk of possessable objects we unquestioningly assume that we are talking about ...”

“... superstate, and ‘the people’ is plastered across almost every Euro-story. In February, Michael Portillo was praised for reminding Chancellor Kohl that the nation state was far from a thing of the past: ‘OUR nation is very important to the people of the United Kingdom. We’ve given away enough to Europe already.’ Kohl is ‘just interested in ...”

“... the majority were women, but not a large majority. I think the queue was disproportionately non-white, but that is said without much conviction. There seemed to be a considerable number of tourists both in the queue, Americans particularly, and in the crowd, where a great many Italians and Spaniards were taking photographs. There is a view that the reaction ...”

“... dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become an alienated, albeit highly lucrative profession rather than a sport. The game’s most flamboyant and most ...”

“... the face of increasing ‘coloured immigration’, a good campaign slogan would be ‘Keep England White’. Somehow he staggered through four years in this way, confiding to Colville on his last night at No. 10: ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do it.’ Given that Churchill’s opinion was quite widely shared, it seems surprising now that Eden was allowed to ...”

“... officers ‘both a sneezing’ (a snuff box). In the waistcoat there’s ‘a prodigious bundle of white thin substances … marked with black figures; which we humbly conceive to be writings’, along with ‘a sort of engine, from the back of which were extended twenty long poles … wherewith we conjecture the Man-Mountain combs his head’.Grant ...”

“... the 1993 Prize, an actual dispute about contemporary art was staged at the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each ...”

“... of a leadership election among Conservative MPs in which she secured more votes than her rival Michael Heseltine but not quite enough to prevent the contest going to a second round. At that point her cabinet collectively turned against her and let her know that she needed to step down for their sake. They couched it as a plea to save the party from ...”