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“... just behave with politeness – for the rest – she’s had it.’ In his biography of Williams, Michael Freedland gives a fuller account of this incident. He explains the basis of the sketch – two spies complaining about the uselessness of their technical gadgetry – and quotes Fenella Fielding: ‘We both had death pills. I would die first leaving him ...”

“... within the 16,900,000 population of Spanish America. On the other hand, as reported in Michael Zuckerman’s splendid essay ‘Identity in British America’, the journey across the Atlantic was hellish, quite unlike (in the right monsoon) the trip from the Hadramaut to Zanzibar, or from Canton to Johor. As late as the 18th century, Eliza Pinckney ...”

“... should not be allowed to put one off reading it. All the economic reasons for not producing black and white pocket catalogues are obvious, and I own and pore over illustrated art books. But I am also sure that paintings sometimes need to be defended from apparatus which seems to celebrate them, but really confuses the relationship which matters most ...”

“... and Jewish; a celibate sensualist, a congenital iconoclast and a National Liberal. He dined off black plates and dreamed of Disraeli. His friends thought that he needed a wife or a God, or possibly both. In middle life he acquired one of the former, and continued to seek the latter on periodic retreats.’ To most right-thinking regular officers such a man ...”

“... Hirschbein’s Miriam and Mendele’s Valley of Tears. The persistent tales of auction blocks – black slave style – in restaurants at ports of arrival may or may not be well-founded, but ‘it seems likely that something like nine thousand Jewish women came to practise prostitution in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay during the quarter-century ...”

“... and does not want to go away, water is central to visions of the dry land. When the historian Michael Cathcart, then a student, asked a university research committee for a Land Rover to do ‘fieldwork’, he was asked by those who thought the vehicle should be used for more scientific purposes: ‘What are you collecting?’ ‘Adjectives,’ Cathcart ...”

“... to lose his seat. Now, Bill Rammell, the intrepid minister for higher education, has picked up the black spot that fell from Collins’s hand. He has set up a review which is apparently likely to recommend that citizenship classes should deal with the ‘core British values’ of democracy, freedom of speech, fairness and responsibility, and how they have ...”

“... or another – and latterly kept African slaves, who she thought were subhuman (‘these nasty black beasts’) and responsive only to the whip. Ellis omits most of this. Maybe she has reasons to distrust Meryon, but if so she doesn’t give them. So far as judging character is concerned, most of Stanhope’s assessments seem to have been coloured by the ...”

“... Clancy fired the agent who had represented him for 15 years and hired a ‘business manager’, Michael Ovitz, who, he hoped, would market his technothrillers more lucratively in Hollywood. Most of what has happened to the book business since 1960 is, according to Epstein, retrograde. ‘Trade publishing’, by which he means the careful making of good ...”

“... on which he’d been elected, and to find a way of blaming it on others. It was decided to send Michael Armacost, an old China hand in both Democratic and Republican Administrations, to conduct the final obsequies. Armacost, indeed, refused to take on the mission ‘unless there was a consensus that the human rights linkage was going to be jettisoned. He ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... the frame, these women also ‘externalise the viewer’, which heightens our sense of autonomy. (Michael Fried would call this ‘absorption’, while Freud might see it as voyeurism.) A related argument can be made about Seurat. In The Models (1886-88), he depicts three nudes in his studio with La Grande Jatte behind them, one on the floor with her back to ...”

“... charge was a matter for the prosecuting authorities. Not long afterwards the attorney general, Sir Michael Havers, told the Commons more candidly: ‘One must realise that the 600-year-old statute is couched in such archaic language that it would be difficult to prove all the necessary ingredients of the crime and for a modern jury to come to grips with the ...”

“... the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the pupillage. Donovan didn’t put his name forward and years later fails even to recognise him at a cocktail party. The opening page of The Breezes ...”