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“... opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando … tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me after into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.’‘The phrasing is a tad overheated,’ Felski writes, ‘but it is to Steiner’s credit that he is willing to own up ...”

“... by ‘nomenklatura’, a more systematic term developed by the Djilas admirer and Soviet dissident Michael Voslensky. In the United States in the 1960s, neoconservatives, most notably Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recycled the phrase ‘the New Class’ to refer to parasitic public sector bureaucrats who were making the US ‘a society of public affluence and ...”

“... quantity of the letters he had received. He often added an instruction to the letters he wrote: ‘Burn this!’ To one correspondent, he wrote: ‘Burn my letter with fire or candle (if you have either! Otherwise, wade out into the sea with it and soak the ink out of it).’ In two of his stories, ‘The Aspern ...”

“... They urge the vulnerability of newly-discovered collection sites, as hungry humans push slash-and-burn agriculture ever closer to jungles seething with unknown butterflies. They tell us boys’ own tales of butterfly-chasing in South America – torrential rains, mudslides, sinister border guards. They try to persuade us that lepidoptery is the flagship of ...”

“... knew that ‘superficial knowledge and flash’ were not enough when it came to her young lover Michael Bruce’s preparation for what she hoped would be a career in British politics. She excoriated travellers’ tales of the East that only scratched surfaces, including Lamartine’s celebrated Voyage en Orient (1835), the book that was largely responsible ...”

“... Most of the politicians now in power are ‘the same warlords and murderers’, as Archbishop Michael Francis told me last year. According to the Accra guidelines, sitting politicians are not allowed to stand for election, but there have already been shameless manoeuvrings. ‘People come here and shake my hand,’ Klein says, ‘and they say they want to ...”

“... of his prolific (hetero)sexual adventures: he had, says a more up-to-date historian than Rowse, Michael MacDonald, ‘a mesmerising personality and the sexual appetite of a goat’, and studded his diary with his ‘haleking’, as he put it, with an A to Z of his women, and with planning or avoiding such occasions as his consultation of the stars ...”

“... It can be a symbol of conservatism or a banner of protest. Radicals and artists sometimes trample, burn or mutilate it, but in the post-9/11 years dissenters are more likely to fly the flag than besmirch it. Protesters against the war in Iraq, adopting the slogan ‘peace is patriotic,’ often carry the flag; and two years ago advocates of immigrant ...”

“... and studiously avoids political controversy. The book expands on a pair of articles (written with Michael Levi) in Foreign Affairs, which argued that recent fluctuations in the price of oil marked the end of a period of relative stability that began in the late 1970s. The first piece ran in 2011, when the yearly average price of Brent crude exceeded $100 for ...”

“... of real-life American stand-ups who’ve spectacularly scuttled their own careers (Louis C.K., Michael Richards), but the veniality of Manny’s ‘emotional misconduct’ (he slept with each of his accusers once, proposed marriage, then never called) suggests we’re not to dwell too much on them. Bordas wants to give him the trappings of disgrace without ...”

“... National Museum and the Natural History Museum), his diaries remain in England. They were seen by Michael Collins and Eamon Duggan during the 1921 Treaty negotiations. In the early Thirties Duggan wrote: Michael Collins and I saw the Casement Diary by arrangement with Lord Birkenhead. We read it. I did not know ...”

“... propositions in the same book.’ Knopf turned the book down. Baldwin’s agent advised him to burn it. ‘When I turned the book in,’ Baldwin later said, ‘I was told I shouldn’t have written it. I was told to bear in mind that I was a young Negro writer with a certain audience and I wasn’t supposed to alienate that audience. And if I published the ...”

“... beyond the limits of permissible displeasure. And so, in his own way, does the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. Funny Games (1997) is a violent melodrama about a respectable family set upon by nasty criminals, much as in The Desperate Hours (1955) or Cape Fear (1962). (Both films were remade in the 1990s, by ...”

“... soon every scrap of paper that survived the purges at Max Gate will have been through the mill. Michael Millgate calls his new edition of the biography ‘The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy’. Since he has stripped it of the thin marital disguise of his wife’s name and cleared it of Florence’s editorial emendations carried out after ...”

“... of friends helped her to smuggle her copy out of the country, and took her drafts to the desert to burn them. It is not entirely clear why a bonfire in the backyard wouldn’t have done the job, but perhaps her precautions were justified. If the secret police had connected ‘Michael Collins’ or ‘Justin Coe’ with Ms ...”