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“... which are always skewing into the most unexpected metaphors. It is rare to find luminous powers of realism and narrative clarity so finely combined with a high poetic temperature. Joseph Brodsky said that there is a poem on every page of Roth, and certainly, Roth’s almost nervous fondness for metaphor recalls the image-blessed, image-sick prose of ...”

“... to look for ways of remaining unapologetically gay writers without writing ‘gay novels’. Michael Cunningham won a large readership with The Hours, in which gay lives featured without being allowed to predominate, though his touch seems less sure in his most recent offering, By Nightfall. A narrative about a married man’s brief and inconclusive ...”

“... war and peace are questions of life and death. Not the death of some or even many people, but as Michael Walzer proposes in Arguing about War, the ‘moral as well as physical extinction’ of an entire people. True, it is only rarely that a nation will find its ‘ongoingness’ – its ability ‘to carry on, and also to improve on, a way of life handed ...”

“... respect, there is no comparison with the situations in 1956 or 1968. The strategy of the Western powers in the present crisis is not hard to discern through the clouds of official hypocrisy concerning support for the demands of the Polish workers (demands which in some instances have never been acceded to in the West). If the dynamic of the revolution is not ...”

“... no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as surprisingly, Townshend quotes Michael Collins, who had fought in 1916 and three years later became president of the IRB Supreme Council, insisting that ‘the cause was not the Irish Republic’ but ‘liberation from English occupation’.* Certainly it ‘did not change the relationship ...”

“... putting the finishing touches to a government reshuffle that would see him shunt his old friend Michael Gove from the Department of Education to a new role as chief whip. In effect he was clearing the decks for the following year’s election and he needed one of his most contentious and least popular ministers to be less visible. Still, he discussed it ...”

“... males. These could be the men of her own party, as when she notes how hopeless Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine were when they accompanied her on a visit to Reagan in 1985. ‘I did not bring them again,’ she remarks, for all the world as though they were a couple of incontinent pet dogs. But foreign statesmen could fare little better. That same ...”

“... a seat on Lambeth Council. I had worked for two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States ...”

“... fantasies, and to their use of magic as a metaphor for the writer’s imagination. Margaret and Michael Rustin go further. Narratives of Love and Loss discusses several books for children which the authors see as concerned with questions of emotional development and in which they perceive ‘latent depths of meaning’. The popularity of the works selected ...”

“... as implied, for example, in the Tebbit Bill: it is not that abroad the legal or economic powers of unions are more restricted, it is that ‘unlike the British they do not wish to use them in ways damaging to the nation in general and their members in particular.’ Furthermore, the unions are not really to blame for these attitudes. They have ...”

“... this information) has hopelessly diminished the role apparently played by the individual.’ Michael Heim, among others, fears Babel: ‘Fragments, reused material, the trails and intricate pathways of “hypertext” ... advance the disintegration of the centring voice of contemplative thought.’ Such dissent, Landow says, exemplifies the line of ...”

“... just how far men and women responded to these promptings and why. This is the main drawback in Michael Dobson’s clever, lucid and scrupulously-researched book about the making of Shakespeare’s national reputation. Part of the current fashion for problematising the literary canon, it argues that there were three main reasons for the rise of Bardolatry ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”

“... surely views his period as leader of al-Qaida with satisfaction. In Decoding al-Qaida’s Strategy Michael Ryan draws a useful distinction between the drawn-out or ‘deep’ battle of ideas and the ‘close’ battle of combat. The recent al-Qaida advances can be seen as close-battle victories of relatively little importance, but al-Qaida and the West are ...”

“... alcohol and morphine. But the persona he created still drives sales sixty years after his death. Michael Hofmann’s 2009 translation of his last novel, Alone in Berlin, sold around 350,000 copies in the UK alone, 100,000 of them in the first three months after publication. Much of Alone in Berlin’s success has to do with the way the story is told. Otto ...”