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“... is in the nature of Macbeth to be swift and utterly single-minded,’ the critic Michael Long writes. As though there must be no time for hesitation or revision or doubt. As though there is a danger that momentum might be lost. A change of heart – or even the possibility of giving up on the usurpation of Duncan – must not, cannot, be ...”

“... movies out like sausages, and it turned out to be a very good idea: the assembly-line concept,’ Frank Capra said. ‘They weren’t our films then. They were called our “product”.’Just as the geriatric jamboree of silent filmmakers starts to lose steam, Jeanine Basinger intrudes herself like an anxious hostess into the conversation and into ...”

“... around the world’. Big tech is ferociously protective of its own privacy while abusing ours. Frank Wilhoit’s claim that ‘conservatism consists of one proposition: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect’ applies precisely to the industry and its captains.While ...”

“... made out of marijuana, which meant that you didn’t have to inhale if you didn’t desire.) Frank Aller, the brilliant scholar of China who was one of the chief ornaments of that address, later took his despair and disillusion to the length of self-slaughter. Most were more sanguine. I don’t especially remember Bill Clinton, perhaps because he was one ...”

“... he said! ‘W.B. Yeats.’ And added: ‘I’m a poet.’ If he had said his name was Michael and declared himself to be an archangel it could not have had a more catastrophic effect upon me. ‘What?’ I exclaimed, ‘Yeats! The Irish poet! My God – well, my God … well … Yeats … well …’ Then I suddenly heard the ghastly sound of my ...”

“... that or return the publisher’s advance), calling his debut Doings and Undoings. The columnist Michael Kinsley once observed that Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, and Podhoretz was an old critic’s version of a young critic, publishing in the proper publications and bemoaning hairy barbarians like the Beats (‘The Know-Nothing ...”

“... of Walter Benjamin above all; with European cinema, from Murnau through Leni Riefenstahl to Michael Haneke; with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism; with mid to late Derrida; with Barthes, the decoder of the close-up face in cinema and the figure in the still photograph. She shows us the swaying edifice of Weimar as it goes down, and the horrors that ...”

“... Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a huge conspiracy to pervert the course of justice must have taken place. Where did this leave Havers’s conspiracy? Had the Court of Appeal ...”

“... of Skopelos to the chariots often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the ...”

“... is patterned on the one in Moscow, which owes much, in turn, to the London Underground. Frank Pick, one of the guiding geniuses of the glory days of the Tube between the wars, was given a medal by Stalin in 1932 (although he did not, as Wolmar romantically suggests, meet the dictator in person). When work began on the Moscow metro in 1931, it was ...”

“... although Channon thought it more Far from the Madding Crowd: ‘She is Bathsheba, Sergeant Frank Troy, Mr Woodman.’In 1938, Honor’s sister Patricia married another Tory MP, Alan Lennox-Boyd. From this point, the Diaries give an unmatched account of clandestine queer life in that era. Channon developed a passion for having a ‘Turker’ or Turkish ...”

“... begun to dominate political debate in Ireland to such as an extent that, as Clarke’s biographer Michael Foy has written, ‘Dublin Castle believed that no secret society was active in Ireland and wanted the police to concentrate instead on open organisations like the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association and Sinn Féin.’ In other words, the ...”

“... of what the EU had become. Once the campaign began, two of his leading cabinet ministers – Michael Gove the slyest and Boris Johnson the most popular of his colleagues, neither of them close to the ERG, both actuated by career rather than conviction – declared themselves for Leave.In parliamentary terms, Remain still had a winning hand, since ...”

“... ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the whole genre as philistine, and ...”

“... the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, were to blame for the severity of the pandemic. ‘We must be frank about one of the primary reasons this outbreak spun out of control,’ Azar said.There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives … In an apparent attempt to conceal this ...”