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“... Walking to our respective graves In superb weather, I trailed a young duke across Green Park. The trousers made some difference. All the same, The conclusion to which I came Was either rich or stark: By the way his hands were locked together I knew we were both slaves ...”

“... In the slovenly laboratory we call Society sometimes a poet will crawl – Great big unsupervised baby – up the wall And from a bottle on the topmost shelf Marked Danger, Do Not Touch, or Self, Swallow, and in the slow paralysis And death that follow scrawl In blood, vomit or piss: ‘God damn you all, God bless you too – but don’t drink this ...”

“... Five foot eleven, twelve stone, sixty-three, I lie in the bath and look at the apple-tree And the apples dawdling into rubicundity To blend with the old brick wall’s well-weathered red. Already, and all ready, I feel dead: The tub, no longer a limp invalid’s warm bed, Is a dank coffin, my flesh wrinkled fruit For the birds, who pretend to be irresolute But eviscerate like pterodactyls ...”

“... In New York City I wasn’t told That mid-May nights in Vermont can be cold. Outside, our brook, short of sun And wind, barely keeps up a run, Just jogs and limps so as not to freeze; Flexing her black tender knees, The mare between the moon and the gate Crops fiercely as if she couldn’t wait For the calories to turn to heating, And is blindly warming herself by eating; Overhead, chipmunks shiver in rows, Or heaps, or whatever racial pose Chipmunks adopt; if there were lights, The woods would be circus-crammed with sights – Hedgehogs on inchmeal expeditions, Toads in cool conjugal positions, Somewhere the bug that bit me lying Jubilant with my blood and dying, Jays, if you can imagine it, keeping Quiet, drops from bathers creeping Back to huddle inside the lake, And in the corridors where the snake Exerts his snakiness unmolested The hiss and wriggle being rested ...”

“... record, it should be said that there is one grim face in the bunch, that of the poet and publisher James Michie – clearly not a seasoned Chelsea ...”

“... call this a metathesis: ‘A raven is like a writing desk because it bodes ill for owed bills’ (James Michie). Barthes goes on to say: ‘Everything is always the same,’ says the true palindrome; whether you take things in one direction or the other, the truth remains. ‘Everything can assume an opposite meaning,’ says Arcimboldo’s ...”

“... given the chance, they had evinced a surer grasp of Kingsley’s stature. When Andrew Sinclair and James Michie are sniped at for being mean, for not picking up the tab, we get the feeling that Amis’s ire comes mainly from his not having been treated with sufficient deference. Surely it wasn’t just the money – and yet maybe it was: they say it takes ...”

“... as other poets Middleton reveres – Seferis, Trakl, Yeats, Rilke – have ripened, with patience. James Michie’s New and Selected Poems includes Possible Laughter (1959) and a batch of 25 more recent poems, mostly lyrical and meditative work on all sorts of occasions: poems about not being able to write poems, a daughter’s music-box, Vermont – a ...”

“... she is the Other’ – has become part of the common wisdom in a variety of disciplines. Helena Michie’s Sororophobia and Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body complicate that insight in different ways, but these books are scarcely imaginable without The Second Sex and its far-ranging analysis of the myths of gender. As ...”

“... fishmongering or finance. It was the Second World War and its aftermath, according to Ranald Michie, which drove a furrow between the geographical and the functional Cities, as traditional City activities migrated further afield, driven thence by bombs or high rents. Nowadays ‘the City’ in common parlance tends to mean finance only. His ...”

“... on me, I set to work. When Hanson left Birmingham, Tara Prem inherited the project. She and Pedr James, the script editor, made numerous suggestions for improvement and the play’s final shape owes a lot to them. My intention was to take a television cliché – a kind of family reunion, a dinner party – and to transform it by degrees and by logical ...”