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“... forward. The willingness of the Lib Dems to accept an apparent fait accompli, like the NHS Bill or Michael Gove’s education ‘revolution’ or even the extent of the spending cuts, was the result not simply of parliamentary weakness or feeble leadership, but of the ambiguities of their own policy and rhetoric. For the last thirty years or so, the Lib Dems ...”

“... needs to learn everything. The Cabrini public housing project in Chicago, where Sennett lived as a young boy, gave its inhabitants almost no part to play in decisions about its everyday running. They were managed but not seen, treated as if they couldn’t possibly have any ideas about the structure of their own and other people’s lives – ‘rendered ...”

“... and does not want to go away, water is central to visions of the dry land. When the historian Michael Cathcart, then a student, asked a university research committee for a Land Rover to do ‘fieldwork’, he was asked by those who thought the vehicle should be used for more scientific purposes: ‘What are you collecting?’ ‘Adjectives,’ Cathcart ...”

“... to the survival of the British nation,’ he had declared, ‘than an understanding among its young of our shared heritage and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms … a nation which loses sight of its past cannot long expect to enjoy its future.’ A Tory politician asking us to include among ‘the national ...”

“... to suppress my fear. ‘And what is your ■■■■ check list?’ ‘You’re Arab, you’re young, you went to Jihad, you speak foreign languages, you’ve been in many countries, you’re a graduate in a technical discipline.’ ‘And what crime is that?’ I said. ‘Look at the hijackers: they were the same way.’ Aside from the points on ...”

“... advertisers happy and the mind empty. Kitty Kelley’s books arrived in my life when I was quite young. They seemed almost dazzlingly competent, frighteningly readable, partaking of the same notions of glitz and sex, power and money, falsehood, revenge, hubris and comeuppance that had characterised an earlier kind of bestseller, airport novels written by ...”

“... an idea and a reality’. In Racial Formation in the United States (1986), the theorists of race Michael Omi and Howard Winant urged us not only to resist the ‘temptation’ to think of race as a biological essence but also and especially to resist the temptation to conclude that if it isn’t biological it’s a ‘mere illusion, a purely ideological ...”

“... in 15th-century England. Her role, largely forgotten for centuries and thrillingly rediscovered by Michael Jones and Malcolm Underwood in The King’s Mother (1992), might usefully have played a greater part in Kevin Sharpe’s admittedly already massive study of Tudor spin-doctoring. Sharpe’s subject is the considerable range of devices which the Tudor ...”

“... baby, grew up to resemble his mother in several unfortunate ways: as a perversely chaste young man, who loved hunting but reviled women, he incurred the wrath of Aphrodite. In a story told by Euripides, Seneca and Racine, Hippolytus spurns the advances of his stepmother Phaedra, who, inflamed by passion, accuses him of rape, driving him to take his ...”

“... by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s ...”

“... on which he’d been elected, and to find a way of blaming it on others. It was decided to send Michael Armacost, an old China hand in both Democratic and Republican Administrations, to conduct the final obsequies. Armacost, indeed, refused to take on the mission ‘unless there was a consensus that the human rights linkage was going to be jettisoned. He ...”

“... of his prolific (hetero)sexual adventures: he had, says a more up-to-date historian than Rowse, Michael MacDonald, ‘a mesmerising personality and the sexual appetite of a goat’, and studded his diary with his ‘haleking’, as he put it, with an A to Z of his women, and with planning or avoiding such occasions as his consultation of the stars ...”

“... we see again in such supposedly political works as Frears’s later Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo, both of which juxtapose heartless Tory soundbites and the images of desolation which contradict them. Political disagreement is reduced to the level of schoolyard naughtiness. Another notable species of flawed ...”

“... of his neck stand on end, a statement it would be as hard to imagine issuing from the lips of a young American professor in pursuit of tenure as it would be unthinkable in the writing of Georg Lukács. It is the kind of thing anybody might say, and academics are not paid for being just anybody. There are also, however, political and institutional reasons ...”

“... of real-life American stand-ups who’ve spectacularly scuttled their own careers (Louis C.K., Michael Richards), but the veniality of Manny’s ‘emotional misconduct’ (he slept with each of his accusers once, proposed marriage, then never called) suggests we’re not to dwell too much on them. Bordas wants to give him the trappings of disgrace without ...”