“... evidence​ at street level from Thanet is that while a sense of being taken for a ride by remote powers – Brussels, Westminster, Holyrood, Pfizer – draws people to Ukip, it isn’t the key attraction. Asked the morning after the Scottish independence referendum whether ‘the English question’ – should there be an England-only legislature to match ...”

“... recent claims is that 1.5 billion people watched the 2022 final in Lusail. Football, as Jonathan Wilson has done as much as any football writer to demonstrate, matters in multiple dimensions, but the World Cup has a magnetism all its own, drawing in millions who don’t otherwise watch much football. Observing its rites and rituals sustains the ...”

“... decline of belief in hell, and in the afterlife more generally, and thus in God’s supernatural powers and promises. Casey is not without his own excellent Pelagian stolidity, and original sin and total depravity bring forth his most stirring denunciations. He happily lays into Augustine and Calvin (and folds the cheerless Cardinal Newman into the mix). As ...”

“... four hundred passengers hostage.The insurgency used to be led by tribal leaders, who have sweeping powers in their local areas. They decide all legal cases – sometimes relying on trial by fire or water. But over the last decade the tribal fighters have been joined by middle-class Balochs and – remarkably, in an area where women are routinely murdered in ...”

“... died. British Generals in Blair’s Wars kicks off with a vigorous attack on Tony Blair by Jonathan Bailey, who retired from the army as head of doctrine in 2005.2 But towards the end of the book, as the commanders who served in Afghanistan get their say, the dominant tone is of anger towards the Ministry of Defence and the army itself, which emerges ...”

“... the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key ...”

“... history that was being published in the Eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me The Royal Malady by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s illness and the so-called Regency Crisis. I also read George III ...”

“... In the course of a meeting in July 1998 between the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition and Jonathan Powell, Chief of Staff to Tony Blair, the personal security of those present was mentioned. Reference was made to a letter doing the rounds in Portadown – I saw this letter – in which death threats were directed at Rosemary Nelson and Brendan ...”

“... English, they rarely contain any comment either describing or situating the sources they cite; as Jonathan Spence once pointed out, not all report or reminiscence of the period in China is necessarily reliable. Chen’s usage has to be taken on trust, which his judgment otherwise earns. The formidable scholarship on which the book is based yields a compelling ...”

“... as a continent – including states that are not part of the Community – in the world of powers at large, where borders and wars obtain; an inner sphere, comprising the Commission, the Court of Justice and Parliament of today’s EU; and an intermediate sphere composed of its member states as they deliberate in the Council of Ministers and its ...”

“... whom are basically human (hobbits, dwarfs, the men of Gondor and Rohan), some superhuman in both powers and goodness (elves, wizards, men of royal blood), some superhuman but evil (ringwraiths), some subhuman but sturdy with it (orcs, trolls). There are no monks or monasteries; in fact there is no religious activity on Middle Earth at all.The story begins in ...”

“... with Wilde, he wrote her a letter in a tone more pompous than Lady Bracknell at the height of her powers: ‘As for my calling at Harcourt Street, you know, my dear Florence, that such a thing is quite out of the question: it would have been unfair to you, and me, and to the man you are going to marry, had we met anywhere else but under your mother’s ...”

“... porn; campaigns in favour of global warming and freedom for corporations. Monbiot also follows Jonathan Matthews of Lobbywatch in reporting curious clusters of former LM contributors now working in public science education. For example, according to Monbiot the educational charity Sense about Science – a prominent supporter of Simon Singh in his recent ...”

“... a teenager called Amy in Amis Senior’s The Green Man, who is a fan of a pop-star called Jonathan Swift.Reading twenty-odd reviews of the same book was (for me) an unusual and unnerving experience. The dominant impression created by this bizarre over-exposure was of an aggregation of nervous tics so enormous that one had to think of them as cultural ...”

“... 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...”