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“... born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had ...”

“... the desert. (The portrayal of the ashram owes something to Frances Fitzgerald’s book Cities on a Hill and its account of the would-be city of Rajneeshpuram. Updike’s Arhat – ‘Deserving One’ – shares with the leader of Rajneeshpuram, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Bernard Levin’s one-time hero, a fondness for sweeping past his adoring followers in ...”

“... and a word from Yeats: ‘The dawn moved along the rim of the mountains and as I went down’ the hill felt the new day come up around me and felt life begin once more its ancient, ceaseless gyre.’ The trouble is that O’Faolain, on his hero’s behalf, is trying to make me feel more, and more tenderly, than anything the story compels me to feel. He is ...”

“... an adventure. I go into Stratford to look at the Swan, the new RSC auditorium. Its architect, Michael Reardon, has done a stunning job – almost literally, since the steep concentrated space feels physically violent. People talk about Blackfriars as its model, but Reardon says that when invited to fit a structure inside the old rehearsal rooms, he ...”

“... Goering abandoned the Blitz. He could not be a giant-killer, but he made fools of the giants. Michael Heseltine, as Secretary for the Environment, bungled the legislation to cut the GLC’s revenue. The judiciary made imbeciles of themselves in their eagerness to crush the cheap fares policy by pronouncing, in effect, that all forms of subsidy were a ...”

“... for his shabby dealing with the splendid notion of Great Birnam wood advancing upon high Dunsinane hill. The Merton Professor of English Language and Literature admits with some complacency to ‘not being specially well read in modern English’ and to ‘no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English novel’. And so with individual ...”

“... forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes. Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea is Niall Ferguson. Only an American empire, he insists, can secure order in a dangerous, unruly world. He does not ...”

“... If​ universities had been an invention of the second half of the 20th century,’ Michael Dummett wondered in his last book, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), ‘would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied?’ Dummett’s anxiety wasn’t whether philosophy could survive at a time when the value of a university education is gauged in increasingly reductive, economic terms ...”

“... with Children, Fight Club, The Full Monty, Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, King of the Hill, Titanic. We can usually think of one or two of these at the same time, but the sheer extent of Murdoch’s businesses is so vast that it is hard to hold them in the mind simultaneously. When his wife Anna filed for divorce and was asked the extent of her ...”

“... assert. For example, in his splendid 1991 study, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960-63, Michael Beschloss demonstrated that Kennedy had been privately relieved by the building of the Berlin Wall, had publicly almost refrained from commenting on it, and had waited until two years after it was safely built before using it as a sound-stage for his Ich ...”

“... with Robert Dole, who was until recently Clinton’s complicit partner in the management of the Hill. Only the other week, speaking in Delaware, Dole repeated his call: ‘One reason to elect me in November’96 is to keep the promises President Clinton made to you in 1992.’ The gap between New Democrat and Moderate Republican could not be narrower, and ...”

“... by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of its plural structure, the department had gained and kept its reputation as a producer-led, oppositional space, not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s ...”

“... so moveable, that one can pin it down no more closely than by calling it ‘anti-establishment’. Michael Frayn may have excoriated that phrase – in his brief, brilliant introduction to the published text, Beyond the Fringe, in 1963 – as denoting ‘a spacious vacancy of thought’, but really, I don’t see how we can do any better. Any real ...”

“... shared around Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Hugo, Proust and Yeats as well as Michael Arlen, Clemence Dane, P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton. Johnson kept lists of all the books she read (90 in 1931, although she was working full time), with ratings: ‘bunk’, sometimes, or ‘the worst rubbish of the year’, or ...”

“... the Channel to begin coining money in Antwerp. On 17 July, the bank’s first deputy governor, Michael Godfrey, eager to see war at first hand, strolled into the trenches and found himself crouching alongside the king, who was furious to encounter him there. As Macaulay writes in his History of England,‘Mr Godfrey, you ought not to run these hazards, you ...”