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“... It is time for a change, even in the small world of historical epithets. For ages, philosophers and historians have been haunted by intellectual tags, such as Was ist Aufklärung? There have been a number of distinguished replies to this question of what the Enlightenment consisted in, but its resilience has appeared to be connected to its unanswerability ...”

“... Does anyone still think Shakespeare’s comedies provide happy endings for their heroines? Come to that, does anyone still think Shakespeare’s comedies have either ‘happy endings’ or ‘heroines’? There certainly wasn’t much in the way of feminocentric festive renewal going on in Stratford this summer: Steven Pimlott’s unusually bleak As You Like It – which appeared to be set at midwinter in the hold of a container ship – gave the impression that the RSC has forgotten why marriage to either Orlando or Rosalind ever looked interesting, let alone a cause for rejoicing ...”

“... Nothing became her life like the remaking of it, but there were so many remakes. The latest stars Madonna, but the earliest starred Eva María Duarte herself. Or was that María Eva Ibarguren? She was María Eva Duarte de Perón on her marriage certificate, but then she also took three years off her age on that occasion. Some of this is easily unravelled, and a number of the remakes are easy to name: country kid to city girl, dancer to actress, brunette to blonde, actress to politician, President’s wife to secular saint ...”

“... In​  Singin’ in the Rain (1952), the curtain rises on Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on the night of the premiere of The Royal Rascal (‘The Biggest Picture of 1927’). The crowd outside jostles and gawks at Monumental Pictures’ galaxy of stars. First to arrive, to cheers and wolf whistles, is Zelda Zanders, ‘darling of the flapper set’, an all-American feisty redhead ...”

“... picked from the gardens of Newstead Abbey. ‘Iris Origo, like Byron, was soaked in Italy,’ said Michael Foot, who cited her book as the inspiration for his own writings about the poet. The comment is apposite also for The Merchant of Prato, which is steeped in the landscape and culture of Tuscany as much as in a particular period of its history. Though she ...”

“... taste of his own, Haitink became the victim of those who had to decide things for him. In Michael Waldman’s unsparing television documentary The House, the hapless Haitink is seen to be flabbergasted as the head of the opera company, Nicholas Payne, tries to sell him the director Richard Jones’s scheme for the Ring. In Die Walküre Fricka would ...”

“... explain what Hippomenes is doing in such a strange position. Reni was surely right to show Saint Michael and Samson in triumph rather than in combat: triumph is more easily reconciled with beauty. But Reni’s figures are beautiful because they are transfigured by heavenly grace, enraptured by some high ideal, or because it is essential to their pathos. The ...”

“... forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes. Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea is Niall Ferguson. Only an American empire, he insists, can secure order in a dangerous, unruly world. He does not ...”

“... where he had the support of Deleuze and Guattari, he continued his academic career in Paris (Michael Hardt was a student) until 1997, when he voluntarily returned to Italy to serve out the remainder of his sentence.Negri’s attempt to retheorise the autonomist strategy began during his first spell in prison, with a study of Spinoza. He found in Spinoza ...”

“... forum, temple etc) as a prototype for subsequent empire-building – including, in the idiom of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, our own Empire of supranational sovereignty and global capitalism. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping is a compendium of 45 essays by 15 participants with the usual killer images and stats (for example, yearly sales at ...”

“... more than anyone else he acted out the strange mass subjectivity of the Pop image-world. As Michael Warner has argued, ‘to be public in the West means to have an iconicity . . . In the figures of Elvis, Liz, Michael, Oprah, Geraldo, Brando and the like, we witness and transact the bloating, slimming, wounding, and ...”

“... The service was dignified, the Dean’s sermon well said, the lesson read by a former evacuee, Michael Aspel. ‘A voice was heard in Rama, sobbing in bitter grief; it was Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted.’ The music was magnificent, spoiled only by a soprano warbling something about ‘Sleepy little eyes in a sleepy little ...”

“... of the painting, the eye can wander about as it pleases. In a recent book on Mughal painting, Michael Rogers observed that ‘in many fine Islamic paintings, as indeed in the late Gothic manuscript painting of Northern Europe, it is left to the viewer to organise the space as he or she will, the eye roving from exquisite detail to exquisite detail without ...”

“... in the bureaucratic aftermath of the Jacksonian Revolution, or by Francis Coppola’s fratricidal Michael Corleone in the Cold War utopia of the Fifties, or by The Turner Diaries’ stone-faced Timothy McVeigh in 1995, just months after the United States began a shift from the republic of inclusion shaped by Lincoln, Carnegie, and King to the republic of ...”

“... of all Scots’, so there is some excuse for me. On the other hand most of us have heard of Michael Miliken, of whose Law-like career Buchan offers a vivid sketch. He could ‘create money with a single sentence’, his salary in 1986 was $550 million, which, on the Buchan-approved capitalisation model of Sir William Petty (20 times one’s annual ...”