“... There is Bruno Walter, seeing Mozart as an ‘open, trusting soul’: a ‘happy, simple-hearted young man’, a benign fantasy that Hildesheimer brusquely banishes to the realm of wishes. There is Bernhard Paumgartner, who thinks that after Mozart’s rupture with his employer, the Archbishop of Salzburg, ‘the city on the Danube embraced the storm-tossed ...”

“... trial. But his name comes in handily because it has been coupled with MacCaig’s. This was by Michael Schmidt, who pointed out that the sort of figurative writing associated with Raine, patented as ‘ludic’, had been practised by MacCaig from long ago. What Schmidt had in mind must have been something like ‘Running Bull’: All his weight’s ...”

“... Reform Bills, and the loss of its MP, one of the ministerial architects of the poll tax, Michael Ancram; or the fact that they came within the narrowest shave of losing their Defence Secretary George Younger, in Ayr – by general consent a good constituency MP, and a very possible successor to Mrs Thatcher. In crude terms, the Scots found the ...”

“... first book, Ernst Jünger: A Writer of Our Time, appeared in 1952. It was a bold debut because the young critic was committing lese-majesty against one of Germany’s most celebrated living writers. He subjected Jünger to a linguistic analysis clearly influenced by Wittgenstein’s methods, and the result was far more persuasive than the contemporary Marxist ...”

“... literally, as a relationship ‘of heat’) and that on another occasion, Blum’s assistant, a young Anglo-Irishman called Michael Bloch, describes the connection between the two women as being ‘of a romantic nature’. Blum is married to an ailing old French general, but Blackwood is not convinced of her heterosexual ...”

“... was born in 1872, the son of a professor of medicine in Gröningen. The young man studied Sanskrit, taking his doctorate in 1897, and his idiosyncratic path from there to the European Middle Ages shaped what he did when he arrived. Dutch history had only begun in earnest in the 16th century, so that Holland was late in producing ...”

“... a sore throat, maybe a fever, maybe no symptoms at all – so what?As the US health secretary Michael Leavitt put it in 2006, ‘anything we say in advance of a pandemic happening is alarmist; anything we say afterwards is inadequate.’ The Chinese government, for all its undoubted faults, instituted rational measures to contain the spread of the virus ...”

“... Carmel encounters define themselves, often self-mockingly, by what they like: a habit of the young and adrift. By First Love, this has lost much of its sheen. The American, Michael, in one of their peculiar meet-ups, asks Neve what she has been reading and the question feels ‘bottomlessly sad’.Bottomlessly sad is ...”

“... but it’s also on its way to becoming less and less democratic for Jews. Consider the case of Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s best-known human rights lawyers, whose work focuses on land confiscation and the separation wall. According to a report by Uri Blau for Haaretz, between 2010 and 2013 a private detective was commissioned to gather information on ...”

“... his death, Daniel Farson wrote an affable, elbow-nudging Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon; Michael Peppiatt followed with the more measured speculations of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (1996); and last year the Tate staged a small exhibition of his recently uncovered, painfully bathetic sketches on paper. Sylvester, who worked on that and ...”

“... ranks of Conservative MPs and special advisers and in the Telegraph. The most famous of them is Michael Portillo, ironically the son of an émigré Spanish Republican, who found his way to the Conservative Party by way of Cowling’s teaching and patronage. For all his success as a guru of the right, in strictly party political terms Cowling is a flamboyant ...”

“... which Mann fleshes out the story of Moses. In this version, Pharaoh’s daughter is a lubricious young woman who fancies a sweaty and muscular Hebrew labourer, takes him to bed, conceives by him, and promptly has him murdered so he can’t tell anyone. The child to whom she gives birth is sent out to be nursed by Jochebed, as in Exodus, though here the ...”

“... these tend to be men who once worked as juniors in his office, having been hand-picked at a very young age. Douglas Alexander became Brown’s researcher and speechwriter when he was in his early twenties. So did Ed Miliband. Ed Balls joined Brown when he was only 27, after a spell at the Financial Times, and they have been joined at the hip ever ...”

“... to other cases. Said’s book consists of lectures and other scattered pieces, deftly assembled by Michael Wood, and not all bearing directly on the topic, though it is always near at hand. The most surprising contribution is an essay on Richard Strauss, who certainly had spent a long life studying ‘the possibilities’. He set some well-known stylistic ...”

“... of Beowulf in the late 1940s; it was first published in 1952. Recent versions by Seamus Heaney and Michael Alexander might have made the need for the republication of Morgan’s less urgent for anyone who just wants to get hold of a good modern Beowulf, but as an early and defining Morgan poem it remains indispensable. First of all, the poem is a ...”