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“... 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 ...”

“... there are forms of religion, commerce, finance and military action that bear comparison – but Michael Gordin argues that Babel has long been a special problem for science and that science, in turn, has had a special role in coping with it and in trying to overcome it. Scientists wish to, and sometimes need to, communicate with their peers all over the ...”

“... George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much closer to Ranald MacDougall’s Hollywood travesty of Kerouac’s San Francisco novella The ...”

“... beyond 1441 was needed, suppressing the contrary opinion of Goldsmith and of the FCO legal adviser Michael Wood. A month later Straw stopped Goldsmith giving advice (Lord Turnbull, the cabinet secretary, told the inquiry that ‘it would have been better’ if Goldsmith’s advice had been obtained earlier). Further meetings took place, without records being ...”

“... parents to do the same. From 1929 to 1936 she wrote for Nursery World under the pen name Ursula Wise (‘Jane Strong’, the first name the magazine’s editors suggested, was rejected by Isaacs as too authoritarian). Her columns had titles such as ‘Unkindness and Greed’ and ‘Two-Year-Olds Are Often Cruel’. The letters sent to the column show a ...”

“... in a girdered hive.(‘Let Me Measure My Prayer with Sleep’)Such lines exemplify something Michael Schmidt once identified in Graham’s voice as ‘a strange hostility towards the reader’. The influence of Dylan Thomas has often been noticed, and the effect of the densely packed verbalism is, as in Thomas, principally to imply the labour that has ...”

“... is equally strong – to romanticise the metropolitan masses as Cockney sparrows or street-wise, bolshie rebels, engaged in an endless rearguard action against exploitation and embourgeoisement. Vindications of working-class ‘honour’ along these lines used to be uncomplicated, drawing as they did on the Marxist scenario of class struggle – Gareth ...”

“... Trier’s first feature film. I don’t remember the story, but three things have stayed with me. Michael Elphick having sex with MeMe Lai on the bonnet of a badly damaged Volkswagen Beetle while she holds on to the (moving) windscreen wipers; a group of skinheads bungee-jumping from a crane above a shallow marsh; and the world in which these events take ...”

“... become, even from his own point of view. The state of public opinion has been well summarised by Michael Quinlan, a former Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, writing in the Tablet (1 February): It has become more and more widely recognised, in much of United States opinion as well as almost overwhelmingly elsewhere, that a ...”

“... Romanisation. The policy didn’t go far enough, however, to satisfy the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Founded in 1927, the Legion advocated a spiritually reborn, fully Romanian nation. Religious fervour and support for the Orthodox Church were a crucial part of its message. Violence was also essential. The Legion’s paramilitary branch, appropriately ...”

“... and the Commonwealth with the advantage. American civilians scarcely noticed the difference, food-wise, between wartime and peacetime; the US military ate astonishingly well; and the besieged Britons and fighting troops did pretty well considering. Britain was helped by its egalitarian system of rationing, though it had its problematic side. Certain people ...”

“... Pembroke. The Rival Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is the new sound – the song is the first on Highway 61 Revisited – of Dylan’s expanded band: Michael Bloomfield’s taut guitar-playing, the easy-going piano, the optimistic warble of the Hammond organ. But Ricks doesn’t write about any of that: instead, he writes about Larkin (‘Home is so sad’). This comes as less of a shock than perhaps it ...”

“... overcome the greater, whether to shed innocent blood as the price of breaking humanity’s chains. Michael Scammell has devoted more than 20 years of his own life to producing this tremendous, absorbing biography, hoping to restore Koestler and his work to new generations. It was a bold thing to take on. In the first place, Koestler wrote two books – Arrow ...”