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“... the meaningful non-statement is odd but, for the reader, it has a curiously addictive quality. As Michael Wood excellently put it, we repeatedly find ourselves asking ‘why we are smiling when there doesn’t seem to be anything to smile about’.Tóibín is not the first person to advance an interpretation of Mann as a virtuoso of life in the closet, and he ...”

“... Balzac,’ Buczacki writes. When Asquith’s letters to Venetia were published in 1982, edited by Michael and Eleanor Brock, only around half of the total 300,000 words were included. Buczacki has read the other half and found that the editors omitted a lot of social gossip and an even larger quantity of ‘desperately boring material containing practically ...”

“... as ‘the practical expression’ of ‘the spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz’. (Weight misses Michael Foot’s 1949 pamphlet on domestic reform entitled Who Are the Patriots Now?) A different kind of identity came to fruition during the Attlee Administration: new institutions were called ‘National’ or ‘British’ instead of ‘Royal’ – the ...”

“... 30 April-1 May. To Essential Music in Great Chapel Street to record The Uncommon Reader, which Gordon House, former head of drama at BBC Radio, has adapted and is producing. What other readers are like I’ve no idea, but I always feel I am a sound editor’s nightmare, breaking off in the middle of a sentence to start again, redoing paragraphs when ...”

“... accommodation above, with the lease belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having been to look at a very grand house for his magazine (World of Interiors), the expensive decoration of which included several Ben Nicholsons. This reminded me that over the ...”

“... laid the groundwork: at the time, academics at Michigan were doing important work in anthropology (Michael Taussig and Marshall Sahlins), political science (Archie Singham) and African American studies (Harold Cruse). Robinson’s wife and intellectual partner, Elizabeth, began graduate studies in anthropology there, while Robinson joined the politics ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... now usually called ‘faith’ schools, and a new type of school, the city academy. Of the two, Gordon Brown’s government is clearly putting its money on the academies. The faith schools were a particular enthusiasm of Blair’s but are viewed with suspicion by the Labour Party as a whole. Their admirers believe they have an ‘ethos’ and an academic ...”

“... of the place collides with their heightened religious expectations. One such deranged soul, Michael Rohan, an Australian Protestant trying to hasten the end of the world, set fire to the venerable Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969, and smiled serenely throughout his subsequent trial; the horrified Israeli government was only too aware that his actions had done ...”

“... years’.The government was determined to extract an apology from the men. The attorney general, Michael Havers, was sent to Walton to persuade them. Havers went from cell to cell, trying to talk to each man separately, promising early release. He then addressed them in the prison chapel. All they had to do was say sorry. If they did, they could leave that ...”

“... up relying on things like the Welfare Disposal Scheme, where pigs are removed for next to nothing. Gordon Brown’s bright idea: they give you £50 for a pig that costs £80 to produce.’‘What can be done?’ The stormy weather was making his phone crackly.‘Well, this Government has no interest in farming,’ he said. ‘People in the countryside in ...”

“... that, in return, doctors would support the NHS. Bevan agreed, and an amending Act was drawn up. Michael Foot, in his recently republished biography of Bevan, concludes that ‘the Minister and the president of the Royal College of Physicians established an accord.’ It was an accord that split the profession (the BMA accused the College of ...”

“... inside J.C. Penney’s or Costco or Safeway, they’ve looked hardly less exotic than poor Michael Dukakis did on board his ill-advised tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real ...”

“... with the disease that leads to Brexity symptoms of racial exclusivity. The shudders that greeted Gordon Brown’s call for ‘British jobs for British workers’, or Jeremy Corbyn’s complaint of ‘wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe’, are proof enough. To the extent that there is a Remainer folk-myth, it only underlines these ...”

“... the conical elevation of Stave Hill. The seductive ‘Plan of the London Mounds’ in Elizabeth Gordon’s Prehistoric London (1914) showed a triangulation between the Llandin (Parliament Hill), the Penton Mound (the site of the New River reservoir), Bryn Gwyn (at the Tower of London) and Tothill (Westminster). Here, at the cult centre of the emerging ...”