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“... performances which is highly visible, highly stylised, and which I find dull and narrow’, as Michael Wood put it – is not present. Instead we find him struggling with sleep, dreaming about appointments in museums and zoology departments (an entire category of what he called ‘professional dreams’) and remembering his father: ‘It is odd that ...”

“... time, his narrator Braithwaite falls into a witty, hard-boiled, smart-arse tone (like that of his wood-worm who stows away aboard the Ark, or of the private eye Duffy in the crime novels he publishes as ‘Dan Kavanagh’), thus effectively wrecking the parallel, which it is part of Barnes’s scheme to draw, between Braithwaite and the shy and bumbling ...”

“... as ‘les quater Chivalers de la forrest salvigne’, emerged from an elaborate artificial wood, consisting of ‘12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 maples, 10 birches, 16 dozen fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks, and 16 furze bushes’. A century later the design for Lord Hay’s Masque – almost certainly devised by the pre-eminent artist of the ...”

“... legally necessary. Wilmshurst’s line manager, the Foreign Office’s chief legal adviser, Sir Michael Wood, shared her view that a second resolution was legally necessary. But Wood did not resign. He briefly considered it, he told Chilcot, but decided not to follow Wilmshurst. ‘Questions of conscience are very ...”

“... mechanism was non-binding. That is a major change, obviously relevant to issues of compliance. Michael Byers’s War Law focuses on the two general sets of rules relating to the use of force: those governing the circumstances in which military force may be used (the jus ad bellum), and those governing the methods and means of warfare (the jus in ...”

“... performative utterance indeed, and clearly intended to repel all invaders. (It didn’t. See what Michael Wood does with it in The Magician’s Doubts, a book, astoundingly, worthy of its subject.) Hidden motives and additional adverbs were optional, but the autobiographer’s central assertion used to be: ‘here I uniquely, truthfully stand, and no one ...”

“... cast the single vote against relinquishing to this unelected President the power to make holy war. Michael Rogin Paris As the historian David Kennedy has remarked, terrorism is different from, and worse than, war. Wars have aims that might someday be achieved, thus bringing about an end to hostilities, but terrorism has no such aims. The object of terror is ...”

“... soundtrack by an excerpt from the St Matthew Passion. Is Casino therefore a movie about movies? Michael Wood described it in these pages as an ‘essay’, offering ‘brooding considerations of the big questions’, the biggest being why things always go wrong (‘In the end we fucked it all up,’ is how Rothstein’s sidekick, Nicky Santori, puts ...”

“... to other cases. Said’s book consists of lectures and other scattered pieces, deftly assembled by Michael Wood, and not all bearing directly on the topic, though it is always near at hand. The most surprising contribution is an essay on Richard Strauss, who certainly had spent a long life studying ‘the possibilities’. He set some well-known stylistic ...”

“... ladder Scraping the cherry tree – We find in Silvano’s Sloping upper meadow Close to the wood, regal Among seeding grasses, An orchid, each lower lip A streamer, extroversion Requiring subtle breezes, A name to silence cuckoo And frog, lizard orchid. II Did the muddy boots of Tommies Really bring back to England From the Great War lizard-orchid Seeds ...”

“... assumes a Hobbesian worldview: ‘Life is a warfare against the malice of others.’ Anticipating Michael Corleone, Serner offers a warning: ‘Get to know your enemies personally.’ But he leavens the advice too: ‘Often you’ll find they make the best companions.’Lesson four: self-control is key and your act is everything, but you need back-up if both ...”

“... dogs no ball games) and the barranca, the sanction and the delimited amenity. Mindless wood-pigeons bleat like unanswered telephones. Nothing so douce as sandstone in a granite town, a town monstered by gulls and sunspots and unkempt dogs, softened in any case from when I lived here fifty years ago, when, taking my life in my hands, I walked to ...”

“... movements of the hospice district.Irrelevance or irritation. Meals or wheels.The gaspy whistle of wood pigeons’ wingsand their little-brained Roo-coo-cooanaesthetises another summer.A bee taps against a pane.The draught crosses from the open picture windowto the open veranda door, ‘your papers, please.’Volunteers and a few veterans.All ...”

“... in and of itself – all too often ‘a gesture of admiring incomprehension’, to quote Michael Wood – is rather meaningless. Unfortunately, Walker can’t tell how, or at least he can’t tell me. (Rosen can and does.) He simply supplies Schopenhauer’s definition (the talented hit targets others can’t reach: the genius ‘hits a target ...”

“... is not outside the world he criticises, he is part of it, and so are his friends and family,’ Michael Wood wrote in the LRB of 7 September 2000: ‘Social arrangements are foolish and apparently fragile, because they are arbitrary and groundless. Everything about them could be different, and is different in other times and places … And yet it is ...”