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“... bohemian compagnon de voyage were sore. An authoritative portrait of Fanny was given in Michael Sadleir’s Anthony Trollope: A Commentary (1927), the book which pioneered the revival of Trollope’s critical fortunes in the 20th century. The first third of Sadleir’s account is devoted to the novelist’s mother. Sadleir sneers at Frances ...”

“... his death, Daniel Farson wrote an affable, elbow-nudging Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon; Michael Peppiatt followed with the more measured speculations of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (1996); and last year the Tate staged a small exhibition of his recently uncovered, painfully bathetic sketches on paper. Sylvester, who worked on that and ...”

“... part of The Emigrants, the first of Sebald’s novels to be translated from his native German (by Michael Hulse) and published in Britain, where Sebald has lived since 1966. In that episode, Sebald describes the life of Max Ferber (based loosely on the painter Frank Auerbach), a Jewish boy sent to England in 1939 to escape the Third Reich, in whose ...”

“... mess, muddle and brutalising effects. Anderson’s day job clearly hasn’t made him a militarist. Michael Gove would hate his take on the First World War: he calls the August 1914 celebrations in London ‘a death dance performed by gullible primitives’. The other local actors Anderson brings into the picture perform two related functions: taking some of ...”

“... Eavan Boland writes, ‘the attack of his syntax, his brat-pack stance as poète maudit.’ Michael Longley ‘felt overwhelmed and wanted to withdraw to a safe distance’. It was obvious that, as a young poet, he dominated the university scene. It was not so obvious that the university would dominate him. Of the Northern Irish poets who emerged in the ...”

“... 18th-century catgut? The oddest contribution – though also one of the most interesting – is Michael Spitzer’s analysis of the first movement of Symphony No. 46 in B and other pieces in terms of a theory of melody proposed by Eugene Narmour. The idea is that we perceive a minimal melodic event (the movement between two notes) according to its relation ...”

“... is an account of a strange and shocking encounter between Koestler and Jill Craigie, the wife of Michael Foot. One morning in 1952 Craigie had driven Koestler around Hampstead Heath on yet another of his house-hunting expeditions, which degenerated into a pub crawl, though Craigie drank only ginger beer. Afterwards Koestler bullied Craigie into making him an ...”

“... study can stand by Deryck Cooke’s magisterial I saw the world end (1979) and the long essay by Michael Tanner in the Faber Wagner Companion (1979). The other three recent books are built on shakier foundations. Ewans, the author of a fine study of Janáček’s operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and ...”

“... as others saw him, rather than from the inside, as he saw others. In order to put the record straight, as she sees it, Maître Blum has invited the lawyer-historian Michael Bloch to be the Duke’s champion, and has given him extensive access to the Windsor archive. His first essay in ducal defence – dedicated to ...”

“... prose to celestial poetry. (They hadn’t read, these promoters of the Penman in Hollywood fable, Michael Moorcock’s minatory letters to J.G. Ballard, the grind of lost years and aborted projects.) So, obviously, when I met Penman, this Schrader yarn was the one I put to him. Why did he come back? Where did it all go wrong? The truth was less ...”

“... Confidential Inquiry under the provisions of the National Health Service Act 1977, chaired by Michael Redfern QC. Its procedure, the Secretary of State determined, would be inquisitorial. Its terms of reference were, in essence, to find out what had happened at Alder Hey. Although Redfern’s Report, which was published in January, says that its main ...”

“... alcohol and morphine. But the persona he created still drives sales sixty years after his death. Michael Hofmann’s 2009 translation of his last novel, Alone in Berlin, sold around 350,000 copies in the UK alone, 100,000 of them in the first three months after publication. Much of Alone in Berlin’s success has to do with the way the story is told. Otto ...”

“... his publisher, he fell ‘headlong into the gutter’, he was ‘constantly being humiliated’. Michael Bloch, who knew his subject well for many years, is a tactful, sensitive but not an indulgent biographer. His book conveys the contradictions of character and circumstance out of which this complicated, elusive but attractive personality evolved towards ...”

“... assumes a Hobbesian worldview: ‘Life is a warfare against the malice of others.’ Anticipating Michael Corleone, Serner offers a warning: ‘Get to know your enemies personally.’ But he leavens the advice too: ‘Often you’ll find they make the best companions.’Lesson four: self-control is key and your act is everything, but you need back-up if both ...”

“... of CIA directors have written memoirs: Richard Helms, William Colby, Robert Gates, George Tenet, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, Michael Morell, John Brennan. We already have the memoir of the current CIA director, Bill Burns, but not that of his predecessor, Gina Haspel. Perhaps it would be too torture-heavy to be ...”