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“... Blairite vision of popular culture. Where the previous hosts had been drunkenly offensive, Michael Wojas was defensive – a much worse thing in a barman. He was off his face and paranoid, which eventually led to the club closing down. To be fair, the smoking ban and a change in the drinking laws prepared the way, but the Colony was enamoured of past ...”

“... Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, James Coburn, and in England – and in a different, English way – Michael Caine, seldom did anything else. It was also a manner which could not always be easily distinguished from simple idleness. For the first 25 years of Mitchum’s career, his performances were routinely mocked – most consistently by Mitchum himself ...”

“... such excellent studies in the accurately entitled Literary Lives series (published by Palgrave) as Michael O’Neill’s Percy Bysshe Shelley (1989) or Caroline Franklin’s Byron (2000), not-very-literary biographies, some running to four hundred and more pages, continue to accumulate in the bookshops. There (presumably) they attract readers far more ...”

“... Bradbury, as it isn’t perhaps needless to say, and Martin Amis. Perhaps there is wisdom in Howard Brenton’s observation that what binds us together in this period is nothing more than ‘a profound unease’. It is here, approaching the end of his study, that Appleyard chooses, or is compelled, to make some independent valuations. Speaking of Paul ...”

“... not deterred the blurb-writers or big-name eulogists. Among the extreme claims made on his behalf, Michael Hofmann’s recent hailing of Brodsky as the true successor to Robert Lowell and great American poet of our age has at least the virtue of unambivalence. We may not agree with it, but the terms are clear. Hitherto, through no fault of his own, the poet ...”

“... took part far more than their editors did in political, military and imperial affairs. William Howard Russell, backed by Delane, could be said to have brought down a British government by the vigour of his Crimean reporting, a legitimate feat in the circumstances. But the Times’s correspondent General Ferdinand Eber, a Hungarian condottiere who served ...”

“... is the theme of The Reign of James VI (2000), a collection of essays edited by Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch. The most radical suggestion has been made by Jenny Wormald, who regards James’s reign overall as a ‘triumphant success’, and any problems after 1603 as a consequence of English xenophobia and the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Given the ...”

“... of his ‘Who ...’?) But the difficulty with the radical’s ‘Who whom?’ is that it invites Michael Frayn’s reasonable regression: Who asks ‘Who whom?’?The blurb to the wonderful vast new Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk-Greenbaum-Leech-Svartvik) says truly of its quadrumvirate that they are ‘acknowledged to be leading ...”

“... short volume is not so much a biography of Crossman – that is to be provided by Anthony Howard – as a portrait of someone he clearly loved. But it is a long way from being the misty-eyed picture of a faultless hero. Black Tam o’the Binns has a reputation to maintain as a man who puts truth and objectivity before mere friendship. Faithfully, he ...”

“... Reading through the counterpointing essays of Randolph Trumbach, G.S. Rousseau, Arend Huussen and Michael Rey is like eavesdropping on a seminar. Participants in the debate argue about who did what to whom, how often and for how much in a way that reinforces rather than removes the sense of confusion about categories. Exchanging rival sets of ...”

“... Jubilee Line stations. Pick saw all this design work as means to a moral end. A recent study by Michael Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England (1999), dubs him a ‘medieval Modernist’: by which is meant that Pick regarded the purpose of design, and indeed the whole working of the Underground, in the utopian tradition of Ruskin, Morris and Ebenezer ...”

“... however, that we are ‘now moving back to the middle’. He means that we are moving way from Michael Portillo’s pompously ignorant remarks a few days ago when he gave his Israeli hosts carte blanche to do what they liked in Lebanon. I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the plane, I read Auden and ...”

“... in Mackayesque bids for topicality, though it’s worth remarking how oddly off the point both Howard Davies’s production at the National Theatre and Gale Edwards’s at the English National Opera looked.) By 1820 even the committed Protestant and North Briton Walter Scott had to recognise, in The Abbot, this guilty but irresistible heroine as a member ...”

“... utilitarianism as a viable moral scheme in a deterministic world (he has hinted, admittedly, that Howard Campbell, the ‘American Haw-Haw’ in Mother Night, is evil because of his pro-Nazi propaganda, even though he is simultaneously broadcasting intelligence for the Allies – but I find this a puzzling account). Vonnegut is interested in guilt, and finds ...”

“... Theatre Club, then the Naphill Village Players), or her perpetual anxiety that her daily help, Mrs Howard, might quit, are related at greater length and with more acuity than the world-historical events that seem only barely to have affected her. As a young woman, in the early 1930s, she had gone so far as to join the Communist Party, but Beauman is right to ...”