“... surveys of books that are unjustly out of print. And Sacheverell still holds his surprise niche in Michael Roberts’s classic Faber Book of Modern Verse. Sachie is also valued as the prince of self-help publishing: according to the Oxford Companion to English Verse, between 1972 and 1978 he ‘privately printed’ no fewer than 43 collections of his ...”

“... little time for the activities of his mother. Another investigation of the Queen of Scots, that by Michael Lynch and his team, is not aimed at the general reader, for it assumes a firm grasp of the main events of her life. It explores areas of less common interest: her court, her library, her use of her French jointure, her policy towards the house of ...”

“... history of the idea of nature from Heraclitus to now. You will find yourself in the company of a wise Greek, a pagan, a philosopher who believes that a role of philosophy is to teach us how to live. (See, for example, the essays collected in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, 1995.) Pagan? Monotheism has been so ...”

“... birth, life, death and meteoric rise to fame, Ern Malley has continued to provoke virulent debate. Michael Heyward’s shrewd and funny book not only provides full social and literary contexts for the affair, but explores Malley’s almost equally intriguing afterlife. Much to the dismay of his two inventors, he was no sooner invented than he cut loose and set ...”

“... for allegedly protecting paedophile priests, and has himself faced charges of paedophilia. How wise was it to appoint a man who was such an easy target for those he was supposed to discipline? And how wise was it of Pell to bring in a friend and adviser from Sydney on a salary of €15,000 a month tax free, spending ...”

“... him a sizable audience. The Nightfisherman, a selection of Graham’s letters by his friends Michael and Margaret Snow, with 19 poems, photographs, drawings and his essay ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’, is the most useful and revealing book on the poet yet published and sets out the clearest record of his life. Graham was born into a blue-collar ...”

“... with Herbert Morrison,’ Robin Cook said in 1987. Morris died over ninety years ago, but remains wise and relevant for his insistence on combining social justice with a respect for nature. Can the Left recover his kind of vision, and can it win the support of its fellow-citizens? Or is the ideology of the political Left obsolete? Plenty of European ...”

“... secretaries of the 1980s, who believed little could be done about crime, things got out of hand. Michael Howard’s tough regime and then Straw’s were necessary to get matters back under control. Yet the fuddy-duddies were on the whole right: imprisoning everyone does not work. Howard set out to exploit the assumption that Labour was vulnerable on crime by ...”

“... 18th-century catgut? The oddest contribution – though also one of the most interesting – is Michael Spitzer’s analysis of the first movement of Symphony No. 46 in B and other pieces in terms of a theory of melody proposed by Eugene Narmour. The idea is that we perceive a minimal melodic event (the movement between two notes) according to its relation ...”

“... Old and New Testament episodes? Art historians will wish to add their own footnotes. According to Michael Baxandall, for instance, what Huizinga calls a 15th-century painter’s horror vacui may simply have reflected the horror of a patron at getting less than his money’s worth, and therefore insisting on crowding a tableau with figures, paid for per ...”

“... Eavan Boland writes, ‘the attack of his syntax, his brat-pack stance as poète maudit.’ Michael Longley ‘felt overwhelmed and wanted to withdraw to a safe distance’. It was obvious that, as a young poet, he dominated the university scene. It was not so obvious that the university would dominate him. Of the Northern Irish poets who emerged in the ...”

“... World’, ‘In the Depths’ and ‘On the Heights’, where the poet emerged from the depths ‘wise, large-hearted, calm-souled’. Dowden’s scheme, once taught in a thousand classrooms, is now forgotten or treated as a curiosity, but the general idea of finding in the plays evidence of Shakespeare’s successive emotional states persisted. Even the ...”

“... afford them. But as Blake wrote, ‘If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.’ The Death of Empedocles was just one in a succession of foreboding, thunderous histories that occupied Rosa over the following dozen years. By 1668 they had bludgeoned a kind of pre-eminence for him, so that he was deemed the sole living master whose ...”

“... surely views his period as leader of al-Qaida with satisfaction. In Decoding al-Qaida’s Strategy Michael Ryan draws a useful distinction between the drawn-out or ‘deep’ battle of ideas and the ‘close’ battle of combat. The recent al-Qaida advances can be seen as close-battle victories of relatively little importance, but al-Qaida and the West are ...”

“... George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much closer to Ranald MacDougall’s Hollywood travesty of Kerouac’s San Francisco novella The ...”