“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... established itself as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.After the 1967 war, Isaac Deutscher recalled a German phrase, ‘Man kann sich totsiegen’ – ‘you can triumph ...”

“... able to distinguish a series of distinctive eras: the ‘First Peace Movement’ (1793-1816), the Jonathan Dymond era (1816-31), the Joseph Sturge era (1832-45), the Elihu Burritt era (1846-8) and finally the Richard Cobden era (1848-51), which he charts as being clearly pacificist rather than pacifist, albeit one in which pacifists still held an ‘honoured ...”

“... excitement). In a career whose contours provide another of Brewer’s telling case-studies, Jonathan Tyers, proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens, made it a place of music and art, as well as parade and flirtation. Those who paid their shilling might be serenaded not only by love songs and patriotic airs, but also by the music of Corelli, J.C. Bach and ...”

“... by the doctrine of terra nullius. It was a case of first come, first served for the European powers, especially when the native inhabitants proved insufficiently organised (not recognisably human enough) to treat with. That they were not seen only made them more feared in the remote early settlements at Sydney Cove and elsewhere. Just what claims to ...”