“... to keep a tight rein on her three daughters. Adaline’s moral code was worked out in what Michael Holroyd in his introduction memorably terms the ‘moral gymnasium’ of the last Victorian decades. He characterises it, too harshly, as a culture of ‘conceit and condemnation … complacency and fear of change’, but it was a period when conventions ...”

“... bodyguard of the Emperor Nero, and martyred after he was converted to Christianity by St Paul). St Michael is the best-known archangel, and in his role as destroyer of devils is often portrayed in a terrific suit of armour. He is the patron saint of soldiers and police; his shrine on Monte Gargano in southern Italy remembers his support for the Normans as they ...”

“... on it as he awaited the outcome of the power struggle – and the circumstances of their flight. Michael Black’s admirable little book in the Landmarks in World Literature series, analysing in close and illuminating detail the plan and growth of Sons and Lovers, and emphasising Frieda’s sense of the novel’s ‘form’, makes the proper companion piece ...”

“... in politics’: how many aspirants for power – most recently Silvio Berlusconi, Ross Perot and Michael Heseltine – have traded under that description. On the basis of a successful business record, they have claimed to be equipped to perform startling political feats – cutting through red tape, banging heads together, turning the country round, getting ...”

“... back at least as far as the beginning of the century. In a paper published in 1913, the gifted young anthropologist Robert Hertz, soon to be killed in the First World War, studied the cult of Saint Besse as an expression of the values of an Alpine community, ‘taking us inside the consciousness, otherwise so distant and so closed, of the mountain ...”

“... limits of the available knowledge and the tentative nature of any conclusion. The warning given by Michael Binyon in his fascinating account of Russian life, which provides an invaluable background to an understanding of Soviet politics, is very apt. After four and a half years as the Times correspondent in Moscow, he writes: ‘When you are confident that you ...”

“... creating an emergency in which his true ‘nature’ will reveal itself. It is worth saying (and Michael Moorcock, the chief focus of Greenland’s study, was evidently never tired of saying it) that Science Fiction hoists itself up from the general mass of popular literature only by a positive effort of style. Beside Stanislaw Lem, an Old Master in this ...”

“... position by launching a final, overwhelming attack on the Allied armies in the West. Operation Michael, as it was named, deployed new and highly effective artillery tactics: enemy guns and command posts were targeted before a ‘creeping barrage’ that moved ahead of the advancing infantry was laid down, forcing the defenders to stay under cover until the ...”

“... the hero to turn the tables on the agency and to expose one of its larger malignant operations. Michael Hayden, who became the director of the NSA in 1999, saw the movie and told his workers they had an image problem: the agency had to change its ways and inspire the trust of citizens. But in 2001 Hayden, like many other Americans, underwent a galvanic ...”

“... of Lord Hartwell, who inherited the business on the death of his father, Lord Camrose, in 1954. As Michael Berry he served a long apprenticeship on newspapers in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Manchester and London before joining the Army in 1939. His verdict on himself after this experience was that he was a better sub-editor than a writer, and he demonstrated the truth ...”

“... Nevertheless, even if all the examples are not on show, and some are suspect, it is clear that a Young Turk faction within MI 5 reacted to them, that, as Mrs Thatcher said, Hollis was among those that fitted some of the leads, that he was investigated after his retirement, and that, in Mrs Thatcher’s words, this 1970 investigation ‘did not conclusively ...”

“... the chance to speak in an unmediated first person fulfilled a more urgent necessity. It allowed Michael Herr, on assignment in Vietnam for Esquire and Rolling Stone, to write about his own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her anxious upscale-Californian life into a ...”

“... O’. Her price, 5s. ‘She riggles her a—e su’ cantily.’ The description of this prime young filly, taken from the Edinburgh publication A Genuine List of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 ...”

“... Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, until recently colleagues at Time magazine, are relatively young men, educated (at Harvard) in the late Sixties and early Seventies during the heyday of revisionism, and more likely than Hugh Thomas, one would suppose, to have been influenced by its arguments. But while their book is not, certainly, unaffected by ...”

“... associated with women at all levels, they also increase generally with age. To put it differently, young men are the least healthy eaters. Why is this? Do they have more cash to spend on junk food? Or is the macho British male still gripped by the traditional belief that quiche-eaters are wimps? As more and more schools attempt to wean their pupils onto ...”