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“... and its Metaphors’. In their attempt to answer the intractable ‘why’ of the massacre, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim sense that the contributory factors they painstakingly assemble don’t quite amount to a reason, and reach for the viral theory. ‘Atrocity,’ they opine, ‘is like a virus known to strike soldiers in combat.’ Charlie Company of ...”

“... story of workers and their families who have found precious little solidarity in other quarters. Michael Lavalette and Jane Kennedy also suggest that the cost of securing foreign support has been some ‘inactivity’ by the men at home: ‘if internationalism and the international dock labour force are going to win the dispute for the Liverpool workers why ...”

“... other icons now under Japanese management include the Rockefeller Center, Universal Studios and Michael Jackson. Such high-profile acquisitions are seized upon by opportunistic commentators, all too keen to foster suspicions of Japanese duplicity, racism and greed. Writing about Japan, its society and its foreign affairs has to an overwhelming degree become ...”

“... keepers of the flame, while pocketing the revenue for the estate, have no intention of satisfying. Michael Millgate has – quite fortuitously – written a book on exactly the same subject as Ian Hamilton, using the same case-study method. Whereas Hamilton burned his fingers trying to steal Salinger’s flame, Millgate – Hardy’s biographer and the editor ...”

“... Catching news about the Michael Jackson trial, I can’t help being reminded of a caustic song by Dan Bern, a singer less famous than Jackson by several orders of magnitude, called ‘Too Late to Die Young’. ‘The day that Elvis died was like a mercy killing,’ it begins, before turning its attention to the inglorious late careers of other fallen idols of American popular culture, challenging listeners to ‘name the last good film that Marlon Brando made/While trying to keep his kid from going to jail ...”

“... Imagine what it would be like to have worked for more than twenty years, as Clive Stafford Smith has, defending death-row inmates in the American South, only to find oneself in Guantánamo, what the military calls ‘the least worst place’, trying to win the trust of men who have not even been put on trial, who have not been accused of anything, but ...”

“... speaks it (or writes it in his three big notebooks bought for 18/6 at ‘the Press Office in Smith Street’ in St Peter Port); but also ‘of’ in the sense of ‘made into’. It is Ebenezer made into a book. (Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude comes to mind, with its paper-baler who is finally baled up himself.) William Golding put it admirably ...”

“... There​ is no entry for Michael Field in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The search function directs you first to ‘Bradley, Katharine Harris’ and then to ‘Cooper, Edith Emma’. Click on the second name, however, and you aren’t taken to a biography of Cooper but back to her aunt, Bradley. These convoluted preliminaries seem appropriate for two women whose identities were entangled in various forms of aspiration, impersonation, interdependence and disguise ...”

“... and many legal theorists believe it is. A literate Martian, for example, would not believe that Michael Zander was writing about the same society as Paddy Hillyard and Janie Percy-Smith, and at the same period of time. There is simply no space in Zander’s world-picture for the possibility that ours is a coercive state ...”

“... be a greater weight of plastic in the seas than fish. The secretary of state for the environment, Michael Gove, watching Blue Planet 2 and moved by images of, among other things, a turtle caught in plastic, tweeted that ‘the imperative to do more to tackle plastic in our oceans is clear.’ What should be done? New laws could be passed. But that will help ...”

“... Since the early 1990s ministers have been more willing to criticise judges’ decisions: Michael Howard, David Blunkett and Theresa May are prominent examples. As home secretary, May falsely claimed that a judge had refused to deport someone on the grounds they were very attached to their cat. This increase has been matched by a decline in the ...”

“... nation, rather than Puritan attitudes shared by just a number of the godly. The Reformation, Michael MacDonald maintains in a stimulating introduction to a facsimile reprint of John Sym’s Life’s Preservative against Self-Killing (1637), strengthened and deepened Medieval arguments that suicide, which was seen as prompted by the Devil, was the ...”

“... could not recognise them unless they spoke to him. Take Cabinet colleagues – for example, W.H. Smith. At a breakfast party during his ministry of 1886-1892, Salisbury asked his host who it was sitting on the host’s left. The host must have found this an odd question, because the man was Salisbury’s deputy and long-term colleague, with whom he was then ...”

“... to the game. The unnamed hero of ‘Joe Laughed’ seems like the boy the eponymous hero of Kieron Smith, Boy would have gone on to be. At the end of Kelman’s new novel, Kieron is not yet 13. The relationship between the two is explicit, and goes beyond the obvious facts (they are both working-class boys who love football, doubt their friends and defend an ...”

“... to ‘smash the conspiracy of silence’, but found herself instead mildly successful at W.H. Smith and the Times Bookshop. The case was altered only by James Douglas, the editor (also in a crusader’s spirit) of the Sunday Express. Douglas decided, a month later, to feature the book and its photogenic author, in her ‘severe’ smoking-jacket, as ...”