“... of human harmony and a symptom of a peaceful and abundant society – better the impulse to post pictures of your balls than the impulse to evangelise or bomb. When Thomas Pynchon asked the same question in Gravity’s Rainbow (‘What’s it all been for, the murdering seas, the gangrene winters and starving springs, our bone pursuit of the ...”

“... theme. In The Tragedy of Lebanon (1983) an unnamed Israeli Arabist explained to the Washington Post journalist Jonathan Randal that only when Israel raises money from American Jews do we Israelis claim that the entire Arab world is a united juggernaut determined to drive poor little Israel into the sea. In fact, the ...”

“... her cancer was untreatable on Friday 13th. The textual analysis of Jade’s life is a postmodern post-mortem, temporally perverse because it began before her physical death. She lived to see OK! magazine’s premature eulogy, its cover displaying the dates of her life. Jade’s life felt complete before it was biologically over – a story with a ...”

“... a professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, from her academic duties. In a blog post, Dean – a communist and anti-Zionist – had remarked of the early scenes from 7 October:Who could not feel energised seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air? The ...”

“... commitment to indeterminacy not only emboldened his juniors Boulez and Stockhausen to relax their post-serial stringencies and introduce a limited element of performer-choice, but affected, for example, Lutoslawski in his pursuit of the kind of controlled free-for-all for which his mature orchestral works are impressive, and even Britten in devising the ...”

“... shape than any other in the EU looked reasonable enough. It was a boast no other government in the post-war period had been able to make and it would have been taken as axiomatic that any government that could make such a claim would be the safest of shoo-ins. Yet Labour, which had taken a lead in the polls in late 1992, never lost it thereafter and always ...”

“... where cousins and princelings jostle for position. But he expertly handled his ascent to the post of defence minister and then, at 31, crown prince, fighting off many more plausible candidates. He seems to have got there through a mix of homespun values, a flair for intra-palace scheming – he planted spies in the inner circle of his dying grandfather ...”

“... of the DUP founded by the magnificent fundamentalist preacher Ian Paisley. Their first child, Jonathan, was born, and Iris was brought low by post-natal depression. She sought relief in her local church, where, one day, she found her faith validated by a lovely coincidence. The speaker told the story of a soldier dying ...”

“... been Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, prophets of Cold War paranoia, rather than Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen, or all the chroniclers of the immigrant experience from Henry Roth to Jhumpa Lahiri. Pynchon and DeLillo have had oddly few successors, even though the end of the Cold War, with the apparent triumph of American-style capitalism, only accelerated ...”

“... were probably closed two-thirds of the time. Biographers, notably Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Bate, have struggled to determine the impact plague had on Shakespeare’s life and work. Did Shakespeare flee London during extended outbreaks, and so spend much of the first decade of the 17th century with his family in Stratford? Did he continue ...”

“... cultural, financial and moral collapse. Entropy: GET IT DONE! We seem to have arrived at a bleak post-contemporary present where nothing has depth or traction or consequence. It’s here, or almost here, and then it’s gone: politics as a dance of blind men thrashing the air with white sticks, while failing to land a single blow on a Struwwelpeter ...”

“... and Land’s investigation into colour vision. The narrative interest depended on the fact that Jonathan I. was a painter and on the detail of how he coped with a new life devoid of hue. Colourblindness, however intellectually interesting, does not have the same deep reverberations as the conscious/unconscious story of Awakenings, is hardly the ‘curt ...”

“... or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a funny way to start because beginnings and ...”

“... culminating in the appearance of his letters, weighing in at a substantial 768 pages, edited by Jonathan Allison of the University of Kentucky, who notes, a little ominously, that ‘this volume represents only a fraction of the extant letters … and there is certainly enough material for a further volume.’ MacNeice was born in Belfast, ‘between the ...”

“... any good, either, which is to overlook not only the work of such writers as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, but also Ronald Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica, a TV series that’s as intelligent, nuanced and unflinching an examination of the United States’ post-9/11 militarism, foreign policy and relation to ...”