“... Delane, the first great editor of the Times, said in 1852: ‘The purpose and duties of the two powers are constantly separate, generally independent, sometimes diametrically opposed … the press can enter into no close or binding alliances with the statesmen of the day, nor can it surrender its permanent interests to the convenience of the ephemeral power ...”

“... abuse which were the lot of the embattled satirist. Johnson had heard the son of Pope’s friend Jonathan Richardson give an account of the poet greeting an attack by Colley Cibber, who was to be crowned King of the Dunces in the final version of The Dunciad. I have heard Mr Richardson relate that he attended his father the painter on a visit, when one of ...”

“... knots as some of Butterfield’s followers have done, he has his own distinctive historiography. Jonathan Steinberg argues in this book that Hinsley believes that men in politics behave as rational beings. To go to war is not an irrational act, nor is nationalism a meaningless emotion. What is more, Hinsley believes that in international relations men have ...”

“... and, in the playwright’s name, deploy a considered programme of anti-Jacobin propaganda. As Jonathan Bate has pointed out in an incisive study of the cultural politics of the period,* Hazlitt stands as the Radical to Coleridge’s Conservative in terms of a struggle for possession of Shakespeare that was a feature of British ideology between Waterloo ...”

“... breed’ of upstart writers. Swift is present as a contrast to the maligned Manley: ‘If Jonathan Swift is to be granted the stature of a political commentator, why not Delarivière Manley? And if Jonathan Swift is still considered worthy of retention in the literary canon, and worthy of continued study, why not ...”

“... Europe’s most open and prosperous societies. This fascinating world has been brought to life by Jonathan Israel’s great study, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (2001). But Israel isn’t mentioned in Multitude’s extensive notes. Hardt and Negri’s concern is with rebirth, not historiography. It is the great seer who appeals ...”

“... In reviewing a book on literary theory recently, a noted American structuralist, Jonathan Culler, drew a stern line between the sort of assumptions about literature that might do for ordinary ‘readers’ and those that are currently giving ‘vitality’, as he put it, to ‘literary studies’. The point is well taken; and it also casts a certain light on the present book, Deconstruction and Criticism, as well as on the general condition (and conditions) of American academic ‘vitality ...”

“... series of trials and tribulations culminating in the Holocaust. Both were suspicious of outside powers, sharing the same bunker mentality, and both were strong advocates of Israeli self-reliance. In some ways Shamir was the more intransigent of the two. For him there could be no concessions on the borders of the Land of Israel. He was strongly opposed to ...”

“... such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in 1910, the year he ...”

“... posture towards the laity. ‘The writer leads, he doesn’t follow,’ he wrote in a letter to Jonathan Franzen in 1995. ‘The dynamic lives in the writer’s mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously … A reduced context ...”

“... sort of conclave or conventicle in which they would have felt more at home. Where’s the beef? Jonathan Clark inevitably does most to set the tone – and a bold, confident tone it is. He begins by shrewdly identifying as for a long time common to both liberals and socialists ‘a deep sense that history was evolving in their direction’, with the ...”

“... themes again and again, but that’s because she’s a master of variation. She has preternatural powers of sympathy and empathy, but she’s never sentimental. She writes about and redeems ordinary life, ordinary people – ‘people people people’, as Jonathan Franzen puts it. Ordinary people turn out to live in a rural ...”

“... as ‘the Ambassadors’ Plot’ or ‘the Lockhart Plot’. Reilly is a secondary character in Jonathan Schneer’s The Lockhart Plot; Neal Ascherson, reviewing the book in the LRB (5 November 2020), describes him as an ‘ungraspable rogue’. Schneer gives a detailed account of the plot and its failure. In brief, it turned on subverting the regiments of ...”

“... of explanation that Saussure raised into a high point of modern semiotic theory. Otherwise its powers will be exhausted in merely reproducing, at a ‘higher’ theoretical level, those same habits of thought engendered by capitalist market conditions.There is evidence elsewhere in this volume that semiotics can indeed be co-opted by interests (whether ...”

“... Nativity) but in the High Renaissance ‘magus’ came to mean a worker of occult marvels, using powers that in Simon’s case had turned out to be demonic. Magic also seemed unnecessary to some commentators, who exalted human-wrought wonders such as shipbuilding, navigation, land reclamation, explosives, cryptography and mechanical automata – a tradition ...”