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“... insurance for those of 50 and over’. Excepted from these strictures about Classic FM is Michael Mappin, who keeps the bad jokes to the minimum, isn’t wearingly cheerful and has some specialised knowledge, lightly worn, i.e. he is like an announcer on Radio 3. Most of the others are scarcely past the stage where they snigger at foreign names. 17 ...”

“... In Irish poetry, from Ó Rathaille to the rebel songs, a paradigmatic encounter recurs. Up on a hill, or down by the glenside, the poet meets a woman who celebrates Ireland’s pastand speaks of national redemption. This emblematic figure, often glimpsed in a vision or ‘aisling’, can be a glamorous maiden awaiting her Stuart prince, but she also appears as the ‘poor old woman’ of the patriotic ballads ...”

“... they are visionaries like Victor and past military bureaucrats like the Cold War deterrence expert Michael Quinlan and Leslie Groves, who ran the project to build the first atom bomb.On the face of it, Cummings ought to have as much contempt for Boris Johnson’s Faragist Conservative Party as he does for Nigel Farage himself. And yet he appears to be doing ...”

“... of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about diverting, strange, glamorous subjects – and that glamour should not be taken seriously. He was also writing pieces in his own highly original style – pieces that were often ...”

“... of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in Harlem. We wanted to leaf through the ...”

“... in the face of danger. In her old age, proud unrepining Lotte Schloss comes to the high-minded hill-setting of The Retreat, founded by a cracked visionary whose mission it has been to persuade Jews of the wisdom of assiduous assimilation. Efforts are made. But if, up at The Retreat, many of the Jews themselves, however alienated from the faith of their ...”

“... now trying to do. The results are extremely impressive, especially with those contributors (like Michael Lapidge on ‘The Stoic Inheritance’) who are prepared to go right back to the beginning and to explain not only what the Middle Ages did inherit, but also what they (and we) have lost. Yet a doubt hangs over the whole exercise, voiced by Dronke ...”

“... Stone of Destiny stolen by Edward I (eventually repatriated by the pseudo-nationalist Braveheart, Michael Forsyth, the former Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, in 1996); the numbering of monarchs (an issue at the accessions of Edward VII and Elizabeth II); and the official neglect (usually philatelic) of Scottish history and achievement have ...”

“... the rare moment of urban empathy, was more candidly described in The Prelude as a ‘monstrous ant-hill’, ‘gloomy’ and ‘unsightly’. Like the making and losing of the British Empire, London was both burnt and built in a fit of absence of mind. The strands of its fabric (like the fabric of its Strand) were distinctly unimpressive. The first ...”

“... are Brigade officers. John Springhall and Brian Fraser have collaborated on the British chapters; Michael Hoare has written the chapters on the movement overseas. The Brigade has shown an admirable willingness – by no means common among voluntary bodies – to give its historians free access to its archives, and to leave them to draw their own ...”

“... Highland estates owned by some individuals without apparently realising that 70 thousand acres of hill and peat moss may not be very profitable investments. The book is more convincing on the concentrations of business power in London, a feature well established since the mid-19th century, and on the well-known system of media chains of ownership. ‘Wealth ...”

“... carries over, deepening invention rather than confining it. Readers of his first novel, Golden Hill, could almost believe they understood the intricacies of 18th-century American monetary practice, unless called on to explain it themselves. He has admitted to a tiny slip in that book, the mention of liquorice as a confection rather than a medicinal root ...”

“... he discovered a more promising research area: the phenomenon of repulsion in a magnetic field that Michael Faraday had recently termed ‘diamagnetism’. In 1851 he returned to Britain, relying for money on teaching and journalism, particularly for the Philosophical Magazine, edited by William Francis (later of Taylor and Francis, the popular scientific ...”

“... 1950s sensibility. The new generation of poets, dominated by the Big H brands (Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney), were prosodically and thematically more ambitious. And the cultural mood of the later decades of the 20th century was not indulgent to the perceived misogyny and Little Englandism of Larkin and Amis when ...”

“... of people’s will to perpetuate their way of life. Cut stone is everywhere. The very slope of the hill is massively reinforced, so that the road will stay safe in winter. Cities line the shore. Architraves catch the sun. But no other figure, however tiny, is in sight. And none will ever appear. Such a view of time and civilisation is likely to coincide with a ...”