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“... died, and a fifth is missing. At the start, her daughter has received what may well be the missing Michael’s clothes, washed up from the sea ‘in the far north’ at Donegal. During the course of the play, Maurya tries to persuade her remaining son, Bartley, not to ride off with the horses to the Galway fair, predicting that he, too, will be taken by the ...”

“... of a family name such as Bellegueule is a challenge to even the most skilful translator. Michael Lucey opts for ‘Prettymug’, which is as close as English gets: a man with ‘une belle gueule’ tends to be rugged and macho, while one with ‘un beau visage’ is handsome in a more standard fashion. When combined with Eddy (very much not ...”

“... inside a Department – as in the case of what came to me from Clive Ponting. A careful look at Michael Heseltine’s lengthy broadcast evidence shows what exactly was taking place in the Whitehall stratosphere during the month in which Hilda Murrell was murdered. On 6 March Denzil Davies wrote to the Prime Minister, about discrepancies in Mrs Thatcher’s ...”

“... necessary to understand That a poet may not exist, that his writings Are the incomplete circle and straight drop Of a question mark ... In the 18th century Paley deduced the reality of God from a watch: Malley, who, Ethel reports approvingly, ‘made a fair amount of money repairing watches’, is his dark modern opposite, uncertain even of his own ...”

“... According to one early theory, the reason some of the murder sites were close to branches of Michael’s, the craft-store chain, was that the shooter wished to be thought of as the Archangel Michael, expecting the cowed populace to recall the name’s meaning (‘who is like God’) and to realise the end was nigh. The ...”

“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”

“... her marriage, or for many years after it, has survived. She would have been far from pleased with Michael Millgate’s speculations on their disappearance. ‘In her later years she was often regarded as a faintly ludicrous figure, and in her earlier years her status as Miss Emma Gifford or even as Mrs Thomas Hardy might well have been insufficient to ensure ...”

“... coastal range. Between sleeping and dreaming, the men talk intermittently until dawn. One of them, Michael Adair, is an officer in the penal colony’s regimental corps, and has just spent 48 hours in the saddle, riding up from the coast at the express orders of the Governor of New South Wales in order to oversee the hanging of the other man at dawn. The ...”

“... sit upon each other gracelessly, heavy with dull and often clumsily conveyed management detail. Michael Swann is a ‘man with a highly distinguished scientific background, a very sharp brain and clouds of pipe smoke’. Douglas Muggeridge goes off with Milne to the West Indies two pages after he has died ‘tragically’ of a brain tumour. Strange that a ...”

“... Elsa Strietman) and on the politics of the silent cinema – predictably, but with much insight, Michael Minden concentrates on Dr Caligari and Battleship Potemkin – is straight-forward. Here the undergraduate, for instance, will find much of use. Minden’s discriminations between Brecht and Eisenstein are finely ...”

“... buy postcards, read guides and the works of previous travellers in the hope of getting what we see straight and retaining it. Yet those very tests and aides-mémoire will distort and decay the experience. Sebald’s narrator has doubts even deeper than Beyle’s. ‘The more images I gathered from the past ... the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past ...”

“... Apollo in 1976. In France, ‘Curval’s name is as well-known as Frank Herbert’s in America or Michael Moorcock’s in Britain.’ Brave Old World transports us to ‘Marcom’ – the EEC as it will have developed in the late 21st century. Britain is apparently still in. But since the whole action takes place where France used to be, we are not yet the ...”

“... three years of intensive negotiations, has slipped from the collective memory. This is odd. As Michael Cotey Morgan points out in his fascinating new book, it was a conference with grand objectives, most notably a final settlement of the Second World War, just as Vienna had forged a settlement after the Napoleonic Wars and Paris had tried to come to terms ...”

“... be as slight or profound as you like – it’s still loss, and therefore what we’re all about. Michael Bywater knows this. His Lost Worlds regrets the passing of Beans, Grandpa (‘My maternal grandfather is four ways lost. He is dead. He was a man of Monmouthshire. He was a steel man. He was an industrial craftsman. You don’t get much more lost than ...”

“... I happened to read Michael Barber’s rather off-beat and amusing biography of Anthony Powell while waiting for a delayed easyJet flight from Stansted to Belfast and enduring all the usual privations of short-haul, low-cost flying: being shunted from gate to gate, and from sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge to sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge; and being jostled, and jostling, on this occasion in the very burly company of the young men and women of the Scottish Gymnastics Display Team, and an elderly couple, both in wheelchairs, and a man tattooed from neck to wrist, and possibly lower, who was working his way loudly through a large box of Quality Street ...”