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“... of post-Reform Bill politics is the quite unexpected emergence of a kind of radical Tory populism. Michael Foot is reported as saying of this welcome rediscovery: ‘To read the book is to be convinced as well as enraptured.’ It would be interesting to know what his present opponents might make of it. One way of writing a ‘political novel’ is to proceed ...”

“... political career. This has all the fascination of political biography for those of us who, in Michael Oakeshott’s feline phrase, ‘cannot live without the illusion of affairs’ – even if our experience must perforce be vicarious as well as illusory. No reader of such pages in the early months of 1986 will be surprised to find that unresolved ...”

“... New Class in 1956. The fullest account of the phenomenon in the Soviet Union is contained in Michael Voslensky’s Nomenklatura (1984). This shows how the privileged – by rank and, increasingly, by birth – are sealed off from the many intractable problems of everyday Soviet life, which, Stephen Cohen maintains in his interesting volume of essays, put ...”

“... his career was a slippery mixture of principled conviction and clever accommodation to the ruling powers. There is a curious moment in his preface where he goes out of his way to assert that Virgil was ‘still of republican principles in his heart’. He then contrives to make Augustus sound like a constitutional monarch and so edges a step closer to the new ...”

“... relating to that change is wrongly described by Ashton as a dispute within the Livery over the powers exercised by the Court of Assistants. In fact, the Livery was not divided and the dispute was not about the Court of Assistants. The conflict concerned the struggle of the ‘young men’ outside the Livery for constitutional and financial benefits, and ...”

“... Divis, or the Black Mountain, as it’s called. We stare out at the mountain and drink glasses of Powers. Now and then there’s a silence, pause, a moment of contemplation, a gap. It’s like being inside a double bowl – the glass dome, then the city ringed by hills. A line of Lowell’s – ‘this sweet volcanic cone’ – comes to mind, except it’s ...”

“... though without dwelling on it, in opposing the iterative nature of language, with its illusory powers of arrest over the temporal process, to the real unrepeatability of passing time. Sadly, Bergson’s sparingness in the matter of language perished with him. He died in 1941, just when Jean-Paul Sartre, homo loquax made flesh, was launching unscrupulously ...”

“... a live broadcast from a haunted house somewhere in London, with well-known presenters linking to Michael Parkinson in the studio, it was in fact a scripted recording; the reports from the house, interrupted by invented telephone calls from ‘concerned viewers’, degenerated into contrived havoc, and were ended by evil forces invading the studio, and ...”

“... furious bewilderment and confusion, an effect which, like a mad scene in an opera, demands strong powers of control. On stage, the poise vanishes, raw pain taking its place. Several lacerating exchanges between Medea and Jason are taken directly from Aftermath, and the feelings Cusk’s heroine expresses pick up from her own uncomprehending sense of wreckage ...”

“... he discovered a more promising research area: the phenomenon of repulsion in a magnetic field that Michael Faraday had recently termed ‘diamagnetism’. In 1851 he returned to Britain, relying for money on teaching and journalism, particularly for the Philosophical Magazine, edited by William Francis (later of Taylor and Francis, the popular scientific ...”

“... peasants.’) Sendero’s pedagogical origins made a difference too: as the American journalist Michael Smith argued in 1992, Sendero was able to spread ‘almost anywhere’ there was ‘a blackboard and benches’. In some ways, Sendero’s doctrinal inflexibility and its distance – physical and ideological – from the rest of the Peruvian left were ...”

“... the diplomats were right for the wrong reasons. Neither side could match the wisdom of a man like Michael Lindsay, guide and adviser to Attlee’s group. Lindsay had lived with Mao and Zhou as a friend and comrade through the years of struggle in Yenan, but saw clearly, at an early stage, the fatal signs of growing dogmatism and arrogance in the new ...”

“... about Hitler’s triumphalist Berlin Olympics of 1936 but it is not often remembered that the Axis Powers hoped to stage a complete Olympic takeover. The 1940 Olympics were to be held in Tokyo and Mussolini tried hard to get the 1944 games for Rome (though London won). Hitler told Albert Speer it would be all right to build an outsize stadium for the 1936 ...”

“... in the confines of oil on canvas, delighting in procedure, hiding there from principalities and powers. Wildly different as the two men were temperamentally, their art shares an expository tone. They are both concerned to spell out the true nature and proper province of their craft. Therefore the impossible question ‘What is painting?’ tends to occur in ...”

“... self-consciously intellectual’ politicians such as Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay and Michael Foot. Here is unmasked the latent snobbery of the anti-suburbans. The great merit of the garden suburb is that it brought order, grace and amenity to something that would have happened anyway. True enough, the centres of Letchworth and Hampstead Garden ...”