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“... Dickens, who held strong opinions about virtually everything, had his own view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as ...”

“... The tenth and central chapter of Michael Slater’s biography is entitled ‘Jerrold, Dickens, Thackeray’. This, as Slater reminds us (often), is the company his contemporaries expected Douglas Jerrold to keep. Some partisans might even have thought Slater right to put him first ...”

“... now been at least 90 biographies. Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens comes just two years after Michael Slater’s excellent Charles Dickens, the first to benefit from the complete 12-volume British Academy Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters and Slater’s own editions of Dickens’s journalism. But ...”

“... irresistible, when everything essential to that theatre actually lies beyond archaeology. As Michael Hattaway reminds us in his eloquent new study of Elizabethan Popular Theatre, the Rose, the Curtain, the Globe and the rest did not define the drama that they housed. Far more important than the ‘wooden O’ and ‘cockpit’ were those shared attitudes ...”

“... was no straight sex, no intercourse, certainly no love child. This is not entirely new-fangled: Michael Slater in Dickens and Women (1983) pointed to a number of glaring holes in the received view and argued for the possibility of an innocent relationship. What is novel (novelistic, perhaps) is Ackroyd’s idea that for 13 years – the length of many ...”

“... am not heart-broken. I have attended several opening ceremonies. On the flight, my brother-in-law, Michael Slater (Michael Pasternak, according to his ticket) is unable to read because the Aeroflot jumbo doesn’t have individual seat lights. He has the aisle seat – exiled to inner darkness. Speaking of darkness, what ...”

“... campaigners generating the stories. Early in his survey of ‘the new science of psychedelics’, Michael Pollan talks to Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), pioneers of therapeutic research into MDMA, LSD and ayahuasca, who is candid about his choice of the medical paradigm as ‘a means to a more ambitious and ...”

“... balance sheet. Hanson’s hero in the early years of his and White’s journey to fortune was Jim Slater, described here as ‘the Master’, whose speciality was asset-stripping – buying up companies and selling off the assets. Slater’s career in the early Seventies, cheered on by almost all the financial ...”

“... a certain age. We shall be lucky if most of them have such benevolent ideas. The hero, Christian Slater, is trying to set up a drug deal, and needs to make contact with the man who will take him to the man. Where are they to meet? He asks his wife, Patricia Arquette, and she says at the zoo in the script, at the roller-coaster in the film. They meet at the ...”

“... fair range of temperaments and interests. The story is in outline a simple one: the heroine, Hetty Slater, goes through a period of bewilderment and unhappiness when an officious mistress forbids her the company of her best friend. But the author finds ample opportunity to revive lapsed memories of an enclosing world, to evoke the sights and sounds of school ...”

“... in sexual liberation. Her college, St Hugh’s, was, in the words of her friend Ann Pasternak Slater, ‘a warren of nervous adolescent virgins and a few sexually liberated sophisticates’ with ‘an atmosphere airless and prickly as a hot railway compartment … Being laid back about being laid was de rigueur.’ Suu, as she was known, wore tight white ...”

“... widowed Lady Wodehouse, recently bought, for £175, a short ts. letter from Wodehouse to a Mr Slater, dated 2 July 1953. Mr Slater had asked Wodehouse where Market Blandings was, the station for the Castle, with Jno Robinson’s taxi waiting to rattle you up to the home of the Earls of Emsworth. Wodehouse wrote: ‘I ...”

“... opera, The Plumber’s Gift. David Malouf has devised a Kipling libretto, Baa Baa Black Sheep, for Michael Berkeley. Blake Morrison is, with the composer Gavin Bryars, engaged on an operatic version of Jules Verne’s story, ‘Dr Ox’s Experiment’. Gavin Ewart has provided saucy verses for Robin Holloway’s opera buffa about sexuality, Boys and Girls Come ...”

“... of service he outdoes some contemporaries by decades. Before many people had heard of either Michael Heseltine or Geoffrey Howe, they were juniors to Cabinet mogul Walker, first at Environment and then at Trade and Industry. Walker still insists that Heath never deserved to lose, and believes Heath’s style of politics, a Toryism he represents as both ...”

“... kitsch but he also does politics: The Rotters’ Club concerns itself with the Grunwick strike, Michael Edwardes and British Leyland, and the Birmingham pub bombing. Coe is only ever content with full context. His words can seem like a means to an end. They remind. They point things out. They are not themselves intended to impress. His prose is neat-o and ...”