“... speech of drunken dissatisfaction from Martha in Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (first produced in 1962, filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian readership in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Ricks reviewed Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot in the LRB (1 November 1984; the same year Michael Hastings’s play about Eliot’s first marriage was staged), he remarked: ‘Plainly it is the Tom and Viv bits which we are all likely to home in on.’ In 2022, with the second volume of Robert Crawford’s sensitive biography, it’s the Tom and Em ...”

“... her mother died of cancer, and three years later her father also died: her eldest brother, Michael, took legal guardianship of Stein and their brother Leo. He was such a talented businessman and investor that Stein had a private income for life.Then followed the period of Stein’s education. In 1893, when she was nineteen, she enrolled at the Harvard ...”

“... specify who my fellow modèles en gâteaux might be – the late Freddie Trueman I would guess, Michael Parkinson possibly and Alan Titchmarsh (who’s so amiable he might even do it). A candidate for pâtisserie posterity would once have been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 ...”

“... Tory Party between ‘stricken patricians and over-confident arrivistes’. But then he turns to Michael Foot and – too furious to be consistent – denies him any protection from this ‘tool-of-social-forces’ approach. Instead, Foot gets both barrels fired straight at his moral sensorium, and the shotgun thrown at his head as well. ‘Foot was ...”

“... unverbalised life’. ‘“And” is one of the most poetic words in any language,’ Michael Longley writes in one of his essays. ‘It dominates and it insinuates, separates and joins.’This poetry of pluralism has many virtues, but I am not sure that structure or organisation are among them. Virginia ...”

“... predominate, and we get the grandmasters of the trade, such as Patrick Collinson on Elizabeth I, Michael Howard on Sir John Hackett, Eric Hobsbawm on Karl Marx (well, he lived here for thirty years, and undeniably ‘influenced the nation’s life’). Also impressive is how frequently those who have already written the authoritative intellectual biography ...”

“... and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this marathon on hold to sprint through examinations. What on earth was he doing? Fending off the boredom of teenage life, of ...”

“... psychology – as opposed to the psychology of types – was an interest in form. The composer Michael Friedman, who died much too young last year, left a list of column topics which included the thought that ‘I seriously think Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the great modernist novel.’ It is possible to have an argument over the exact delineation of the ...”

“... which to oversee executive discretion, a task that the courts here already have well in hand, as Michael Howard and other ministers would be the first angrily to testify. This is not the prize that most advocates of the Convention are after. What excites them is the notion that after incorporation the judiciary would be able to strike down Parliamentary ...”

“... Two events of the last year have attracted a lot of notice. One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common ...”

“... or their doctors seems to have advised them to stay together, while many (including Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and Ottoline Morrell) seem to have supported their separation. Remembering that Vivien radiated ‘absolute terror’ and was herself ‘terrifying’, Mirrlees recalled how, while Eliot and his wife still lived together, ‘at the end of an ...”

“... was going through Vanessa Redgrave’s mind every time she referred to her screen husband as ‘Michael’, the name of her own father, whose sexual nature was more complicatedly divided. The third section of The Sparsholt Affair is set in London, with Johnny Sparsholt now 21, his surname causing a stir wherever it’s mentioned. He explores London while ...”

“... has much of the elder sister in him.’ Klaus finally killed himself in 1949, as did his brother Michael in 1977. It was perhaps some consolation for Mann, as he tried to deal with Heinrich, that he could move the problems between them away from the merely personal into the public realm. In 1919, he wrote to a friend that it was ‘an opposition of ...”