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“... hundred thousand by the middle of the 16th century – and became wildly rich. This, in brief, is Michael Pye’s story of Antwerp’s ‘glory years’, a few fleeting decades when the city burned brightly as Europe’s most important commercial port.It had once been good to be a butcher. Now, it was better to be a merchant. Antwerp’s Beurs, which opened ...”

“... who made the untried concept of the lavishly glazed building actually work; it was the young Michael Wilford, newly arrived in the office as the first full-time assistant, who provided last-minute design details for the contractors. (Sitting between Stirling and Gowan, Wilford found himself in the creative crossfire between the two highly opinionated ...”

“... Because the man himself is so ungainly, it is easy to overlook Michael Moore’s voice. Where his body seems ungovernable and a source of embarrassment to him – he often can’t bear to watch himself on screen – his voice is confident, almost suave. There’s a moment in his least known movie, The Big One (1997), where he launches effortlessly into a gravelly imitation of Dylan singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ before reverting, with a chuckle, to his own spoken voice ...”

“... Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up ...”

“... It was called bocachica after the fish of that name, which is slit along the sides before being fried in boiling fat. ‘Any defect can be eliminated,’ Olivia Mostacilla had said. As in this town in 2001, when so-called paramilitaries were hired by the owner of the lottery to assassinate wayward youths (offenders under 18 receive extremely light ...”

“... a popular iconography, Andy Warhol is probably the most single-minded and the most spectacular,’ Michael Fried wrote in Art International in December 1962. ‘Warhol’s beautiful, vulgar, heartbreaking icons of Marilyn Monroe … and [his] feeling for what is truly human and pathetic is one of the exemplary myths of our time.’ The architect Philip ...”

“... Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his ...”

“... in the form of a script. Warner’s magic realism is not that of Marquez and Rushdie but of Michael Ondaatje, whose magical images do not require any supernatural explanation. Morvern’s knee sparkles with different-coloured specks because she once slid on her knees and grazed her skin across the glitter of a Christmas card. Lanna’s grandmother ...”

“... jeered me; they queered me, And half of them stoned me to death; They threw nuts and sultanas, fried eggs and bananas, The Night I Appeared As Macbeth. But despite all this, The Shakespeare Riots is a brilliant debut, far richer and more astute than the two earlier books on the subject, Richard Moody’s The Astor Place Riot (1958) and Richard ...”

“... Malaysia than Buddhist central Thailand. At that time, the south seemed quiet. Women sold crispy fried chicken from handcarts at the side of the road, and Buddhist monks and Muslim prayer leaders walked down village streets. In Pattani, one of the larger towns, Western backpackers wandered through the market, where they stared at plates of biryani and mounds ...”

“... Projects Committee, which had nominal powers to dispense tiny sums to popular forms of art. Michael Astor and I spent much time examining claims on these funds, mostly on behalf of projects the Chairman knew a priori to be rubbish. He was never to be found, as we were, along with Coldstream and Hugh Willatt, the Secretary-General, penetrating the ...”

“... that the song means a great deal to his wife, Gretta, and longer still the essential truth, that Michael Furey, her dead first love, used to sing it to her. These layers of Gabriel’s unknowing are hardly different from our own (‘What about the song? Why does that make you cry?’ ‘And who was the person long ago?’), and at the end of the story, when ...”

“... in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from Cambridge, Michael Frayn. Oliver said that he had fried and eaten a placenta. At that time I don’t think I knew what a placenta was except that I knew it didn’t come with chips.11 September. David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching ...”

“... But there are no dramatic videos showing Palo Alto native son turned crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried misappropriating $8.6 billion of clients’ money or of the scam run by ex-Stanford student Elizabeth Holmes, who raised $700 million for Theranos, a company whose sole product was a medical technology that didn’t exist. Holmes, who used to live in a $15 ...”

“... you no longer feel like that – because you evidently did feel so at one time – about Michael Fried?Well, one is avid for heroes when one’s young; especially among one’s contemporaries. Everybody has memories of that. Somebody like Francis Hope, for example, who died young in an aircrash, used to dazzle me with his cleverness. He’d been ...”