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“... declaring a fervent desire to do the same thing to the Senate. The historian Cassius Dio, then a young man, was there and recalls that he and his senatorial peers were torn between laughter and terror, knowing the emperor happily murdered those who displeased him. Eventually, after 11 years of burgeoning madness, Commodus was himself murdered. The prefect of ...”

“... or divine mercy in it, the pure element, neither land nor shipping, nor anything else. Couples, young, old, male, female, mixed – the parallels that meet at infinity. A group of conspiratorial individuals, heavily bearded and hatted, exclusionary, farmers or Russians or uncles. Sketches from café life or the pleasure factories of Weimar. Orgiastic ...”

“... By my count​ , of the 37 photographs of Michael Ovitz in this book there are 19 in which his mouth stays shut – while he’s smiling. That isn’t intended as a hostile remark. His mouth stayed closed when he smiled because he was concentrating. You may not have heard of him, but for maybe a decade and a half starting in the mid-1970s no one in the motion picture business was more focused than Michael Ovitz ...”

“... you will go under if you don’t fight back Surely you must see that?It is perhaps worth having Michael Hamburger’s version here, just to hear a slightly different lilt: And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for ...”

“... become obvious that the Tories were going to lose the election? Was it that golden moment when Michael Portillo, that scourge of unnecessary public spending, announced that £60m of public money was earmarked for a new yacht for the richest woman on earth – even though Her Majesty had made it plain she did not want one? Was it this deranged belief in the ...”

“... Michael Pye has now written two books (the first with Lynda Myles) trying to explain how American show business feels to those who make their lives inside it. The first, The Movie Brats, succeeds because it keeps close to the work of the young film-makers with whose careers it’s concerned, but also because they demonstrably exist as a group ...”

“... on the changes I have seen. The most considerable change has only just occurred to me. When I was young we all believed in Progress and so did a couple of generations before us. We followed the guidance of Dr Coué and chanted in unison: ‘Every day in every way I am getting better and better.’ Progress was a watertight guarantee that, despite temporary ...”

“... put it in British Rail parlance, the wrong sort of prodigy, i.e. not a rebel or iconoclast, but a young man who pleased and impressed his elders. He was a dishy and precocious 16-year-old – still chaperoned by his banker father – when he first appeared at the epicentre of the weird and fevered Viennese literary scene, the Café Griensteidl opposite the ...”

“... Michael Ryan’s memoir, Secret Life, is a book essentially unthinkable before the triumph of the therapeutic in contemporary American life. By virtue of its core subject-matter – the consequences of Ryan’s sexual molestation when he was five and what he terms his subsequent ‘sexual addiction’ as an adult – it raises the ante enormously in the matter of sexual revelation and explicitness ...”

“... Lincoln and King transformed these figures in national memory from trouble-makers into healers, as Michael Eric Dyson puts it in I May Not Get there with You, an attempt to bring King back to political life. But while Lincoln turned in his last months from racial justice to national reconciliation, King had been moving in the opposite direction at the time of ...”

“... Soon after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to parochial schools, where he thrived ...”

“... Give me chastity and continence, prayed the youthful Augustine, but do not give it yet. Perhaps the young Tony Benn, slithering up the greasy poll, made similar entreaties. For this, his fascinating first volume of diaries, is the story of an attractive, vital, boundlessly energetic young man having the egocentric time of his life without a thought for the morrow, except to move onwards and upwards ...”

“... justice. Or it’s the way you justify your wishes, make them part of what the world owes you. The young Frank Kermode ‘wasn’t entitled’ to be his father’s boy because he was so unhandy and so unathletic. His sister’s arrival deprives him of ‘the excessive maternal care I had once felt myself entitled to for ever’. When he falls and breaks an ...”

“... was an accommodating Old Etonian called Jim Shelley. Their commercial property manager was Michael Hutchings, a young eccentric known as ‘the man with the golden nose’ – a reference not only to his ability to sniff out a nice little earner in the property market, but also to his highly-developed taste for ...”

“... her a tendency to melancholia that was deepened by their mutual distrust and dislike. When very young, she stole a bottle of chloroform with the notion of killing herself. As she grew up she turned more to the informal intimacy of the servants’ quarters. ‘She would take refuge in the laundry and curl up among the sheets and tablecloths,’ Jeanne ...”