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“... to us anyway? Given the heritage of Aristotle’s homo civis, Augustine’s homo sanctus, Benjamin Franklin and Marx’s homo faber, Gradgrind’s homo economicus, why has the late 20th-century culture of narcissism embraced homo sexualis as its definition of human essence? Why, as Jeffrey Weeks asks, have sex and our gender identities become the central part ...”

“... Asya, the heroine of Michael Ignatieff’s novel of revolution and exile, is born into an aristocratic Russian family in 1900. As a child, she nearly drowns walking out over the thawing ice beneath which the River Vasousa roars. She has a vision there of a great skater. Her brush with death changes her and leaves her with a belief ‘even when fear had her in its clasp ...”

“... the Elder struck political gold during the 1988 Presidential campaign by castigating his opponent, Michael Dukakis, as a liberal, virtually no American politician will voluntarily accept the label. One unlikely exception is Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s new billionaire Republican Mayor, who during the campaign ...”

“... capitalism. Its memory would inspire the Democratic Party from Woodrow Wilson (elected in 1912) to Franklin Roosevelt (1932) and Lyndon Johnson (1964). More than a century later, Democratic candidates still criss-cross the country trying to rekindle the lost Populist magic. In fact, the present campaign season has seen even some Republicans groping for the ...”

“... a little given to the journalist’s tag, the flat, unneeded paragraph-clincher (‘So much for Franklin D. Roosevelt.’ ‘He always had a pleasant witticism’). However, both men write out of a great affection and concern for Baldwin; neither is uncritical; and they pick their way with subtlety through the minefields of colour. The man who emerges from ...”

“... heads, as Reaves observes, use media-generated emblems of fame (Heywood Broun’s unkempt hair, Franklin P. Adams’s cigar, H.L. Mencken’s sneer) to bar access to their bearers’ interiors. Caricaturists were interested in public faces, not secret lives; their masks varied, personality by personality, unlike the Polynesian, African and Aztec ...”

“... edifying subtext was supplied last February, in the congressional testimony by Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen: ‘Have you ever seen Mr Trump personally threaten people with physical harm?’ ‘No: he would use others.’ ‘He would hire other people to do that?’ ‘I’m not sure he had to hire them, they were already working there. Everybody’s ...”

“... and Kegan Paul published The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, a Wagnerian epic in which history went to town in exuberant, zestful and flamboyant fashion. Understandably, the two volumes won immediate and widespread acclaim as a tour de force of entrepreneurial inspiration and editorial skill: ‘a study in ...”

“... Soon after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to parochial schools, where he thrived ...”

“... DNC speakers so hard their heads would spin, particularly one ‘very little guy’, presumably Michael Bloomberg, who’d implied that Trump was insane and incompetent and could brag of becoming richer than Trump without the help of his father. To my ear the most effective attack on Trump was Joe Biden’s line that it was perverse to hand over the US ...”

“... He sent this to the newly appointed Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday. Faraday replied immediately: Pickersgill’s report had ‘greatly excited’ his curiosity, not least because ‘the meteor or whatever else it might be’ had been witnessed by ‘men of philosophical & correct habits of observation’. Would ...”

“... attention than other writers on the subject to Marshall’s participation in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt’s public works project, the Civilian Conservation Corps, echoing Michael Hogan’s arguments about the influence on the ERP of New Deal-style ‘corporatism’, and betraying more than a hint of nostalgia ...”

“... West to respond effectively to the threat. Thomas does not endorse the old right-wing attacks on Franklin Roosevelt (attacks newly popular among neo-conservatives) for ‘selling out’ Eastern Europe at Yalta. There was, he concedes, probably little the West could have done to prevent the Stalinisation of most of those unfortunate lands. Nevertheless, he is ...”

“... a hundred rounds of voting even to agree on a presidential candidate. Then, with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, there was a remarkable reversal of fortunes. For decades afterwards, the party almost always controlled Congress and the presidency. But the winning political coalition forged by FDR was shattered in the 1960s and 1970s, and under ...”

“... the case, a step that could have led to disciplinary measures. The final decision on this fell to Michael Hayden, the CIA director at the time. He chose not to. ‘It was a pretty easy call,’ he writes in Playing to the Edge, his new memoir. He doesn’t describe el-Masri as ‘innocent’, noting his ‘clouded past’, but does admit he was a ‘false ...”