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“... minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties’ – betrayed a shaky grasp of cultural history. (Michael Foot’s description of Tebbit as ‘a semi-house-trained polecat’ may have revealed an equally shaky grasp of natural history, yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile ...”

“... enough. When W.H. Davies says he saw the wind dragging the corn by her golden hair into a dark wood, the startling and exciting information goes straight inside us. Complex reactions then occur; theorists of rhetoric can tell us how the effect is achieved; but the truth of the information is what really matters, as when Donne tells us: ’Tis the year’s ...”

“... of personal history and the pretty stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the ...”

“... at home in Rome, was as much concerned with compositional elegance as believability: in his Saint Michael and the Devil (1607), the saint props his knee on candyfloss clouds so delicate it’s hard to imagine them taking his weight. Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination (1615-16), by contrast, part of a decorative ceiling in Florence commissioned by ...”

“... publishers alike. Edmund Evans, after about 1870, perfected the technique of colour-printing from wood blocks, and thereby opened the way for that celebrated trio of the late 19th century, Crane, Caldecott and Kate Green-away – vigorous, sportive and quaint respectively. Whalley and Chester note the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements on ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”

“... is at work here, even in the best of these five books, Alice Hoffman’s Seventh Heaven and Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World. Carlo Gebler dissents from this attitude; unfortunately he writes less well. Still, there were times when I warmed to Life of a Drum, lacking though it is in the stylishness and power of Hoffman’s or ...”

“... I arrived I was crossing the Plaça de Sant Jaume when I bumped into Bernard Loughlin’s brother Michael, who had recently arrived in Barcelona to work as an engineer. He and the woman who would later become his girlfriend had found a magnificent flat near the Picasso Museum in the old city. Soon I moved in. I love other people’s lives. That summer we went ...”

“... on for advice, and when he arrived at the grotto he received a visitation from the Archangel Michael, who ordered him to consecrate a Christian altar on the site. It’s not known what happened to the man with the arrow in his forehead, but the result of his misadventure was the famous Santuario di San Michele. In 999 AD, the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto ...”

“... transport frontbenchers in the Commons, up-and-coming young hopefuls called Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, welcomed the transfer, and specifically stated that this would enable the Council, if it felt like it, to hold transport fares down with a subsidy from the rates. Labour won back the GLC in 1973, but lost it to the Tories in 1977, when the new ...”

“... been reissued as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one ...”

“... comedies made at Ealing Studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, as Stubbs reminds us, Michael Balcon, the studio’s head in its heyday, was explicit in defining its mission. When Ealing was sold in 1955, he placed a plaque on the studio building that read: ‘Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the ...”

“... next day. Having gained strong support from most of the Labour Party, and especially its leader Michael Foot, the Thatcher Government was able to continue and enhance its plans for a military response, the first units of the task force sailing for the South Atlantic two days later. For the first two Weeks after the task force sailed, the great majority of ...”

“... By​ the time his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, had its premiere at Covent Garden in 1955, Michael Tippett was considered, alongside Benjamin Britten, the most significant and original British composer of his generation. Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all ...”

“... cheffed [stabbed] for nobody!’ – but was increasingly worried about his older half-brother, Michael, who had ‘been moving a bit mad recently’. Carl went to a community centre in Loughborough Junction where Thapar volunteered; he started getting into trouble after his father walked out, and was later expelled from school.As boys in these ...”