“... 2022 and which he has now translated into English, Luca Dal Monte writes that ‘from his father young Enzo learned the importance … of “diligently keeping a record of everything that went on”,’ and Dal Monte too has taken the lesson to heart, sparing no details. Enzo’s father, Alfredo Ferrari, ran a metalworking business. He died of pneumonia in ...”

“... of mind-bending proportions. Like all the best whodunnits, it is a slow burner. A group of clever young men – Oliver Letwin, John Redwood, William Waldegrave, among others – gather in various restaurants and country house hotels to bat around ideas for reforming the financing of local governance, encouraged and provoked by their mentor, Lord ...”

“... about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels ...”

“... for a comparative approach to historical memory owes a great deal to the work of the historian Michael Rothberg. For Rothberg, placing memories of the Holocaust in dialogue with memories of colonial violence advances our understanding of both. It also reveals the centrality of ideas about race to European identity and, by extension, Europe’s dealings ...”

“... kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity’ to the unctuous ‘Empire-Lite’ of Michael Ignatieff and the ‘liberal imperialism’ peddled by Robert Cooper, one of Blair’s fly-by-night gurus. ‘Islamofascism’ seemed as evil as Nazism, Saddam Hussein was another Hitler, a generation-long battle loomed, and invocations of Winston ...”

“... was not at all Bakhtin’s story. He, like Jakobson, was well-born, into what Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, in their clumsily written but valuable biography, call the ‘landless nobility’; his father was an itinerant bank manager, which meant that the Bakhtins were used to living in the provinces. In the winter of 1917/8, aged 22, Bakhtin was in St ...”

“... that overshadowed their subsequent careers.It was this dispute that first attracted the historian Michael Bliss to the story of insulin. In the account he learned at school, its discovery was a medical fairy tale whose knight errant was a young Canadian doctor called Frederick Banting. In 1920, while reading an article on ...”

“... but that’s because we have a monarchy which is not only a religion but a popular cult: it’s Michael Jackson as well as Runcie. The younger royals instinctively understand that they are a sort of super pop-star, and, while they may occasionally complain about it, the fact is that, as any pop star must, they court tabloid attention, are indeed largely ...”

“... doctrine of Just and Unjust Wars, as set out by a distinguished philosopher of the American Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked by the still more eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly entitled The Law of Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no more than completing the vital preventive strike against the Osirak ...”

“... manuscripts to do with the Society, were edited by Mary Thale and published twenty years ago. Now Michael Davis has collected and edited all the many publications of the LCS. They fill four large volumes, to which Davis has added a volume of contemporary pamphlets, mainly by its supporters, and a further volume of Parliamentary debates and Government reports ...”

“... to his being offered a chance to run for the council in 1970 at the age of 22. Ten years later the young politician had put aside his day job as a teacher and was now leader of Sheffield council, a truly astonishing rise for a man with his disadvantages. Blunkett in power in Sheffield was Blunkett Mark One. He concentrated on his particular concerns of public ...”

“... in ticket sales, the largest US gross that year. Still, there was a vague sense that frisky young Prince – the latest reincarnation of the R’n’B acts the Stones venerated and in some sense owed their existence to – was being used as a heart-starter, to angry up the old (thirtysomething) troupers’ blood. As Jason Draper puts it in Prince: Life ...”

“... DVD of the firework night, it was still selling. Nobody remembered what happened after that. One young woman, a highly qualified lawyer, now working off-the-book for around €400 a month, recalled the only Olympic event she’d actually witnessed. ‘There were horses dancing. Very pretty.’ The story of the drug-cheat sprinters and their staged motorcycle ...”

“... next volume like crack,’ Zadie Smith writes. As the literary critic – and former junkie – Michael Clune has pointed out, we tend to reach for drug metaphors when we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality ...”

“... for three years as an infantry officer in France. In 1975 he was moved to write to the historian Michael Howard by exasperation with Paul Fussell’s newly published The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, an American critic and veteran of World War Two, suggested that what had happened to those who fought in France was so uniquely dreadful that it defied ...”