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“... Barry Webb has assembled shows Blunden going out to bat with Rupert Hart-Davis, in a match between Jonathan Cape and the Alden Press. That was in 1938. Blunden looks miniature, a frail determined Don Quixote with eagle nose and jaw, who had persuaded the burly Yorkshireman as they set out for the crease together not to wear batting gloves, which were ...”

“... like Coe caricaturing aspects of himself. Both characters draw attention to the gap between the power the political novelist believes himself to possess and his work’s real influence. PC Pilbeam’s nickname at work is ‘Nate of the Station’, and the novel switches between being a State of the Nation novel and a Nate of the Station novel – a work of ...”

“... a dream – in a state of suspended curiosity, thinking about forms of language which have the power, or are intended to have the power, to bend the world to one’s will. When Farage travelled to Bulgaria earlier this year with Jonathan Rugman for a Channel 4 News special report, what ...”

“... the strange career and ultimate oblivion of this indigenous philosophy of the self-taught that Jonathan Rée’s Proletarian Philosophers is concerned. To understand who Craik was, it is necessary to go back to 1909, the year of a celebrated strike at Ruskin College, Oxford. The students of the newly-founded college – mainly miners and railwaymen, Craik ...”

“... by his new minister’s skill and dependability and Bismarck soon dominated the antechamber of power. He would remain at the summit of German politics until he was forced into retirement 28 years and two kings later. It was an extraordinary career by any measure. In 1864, after only two years in office, Bismarck led Prussia into a war with Denmark over the ...”

“... Ibrahim Qashoush, ‘Get out, Bashar!’What is striking in these exuberant demonstrations is the power they produce. They serve not only as an outlet, a collective release for accumulated tension; they also give energy back to the participants, fill them with a little more vigour to endure. The group generates energy and then each individual reabsorbs ...”

“... mythos was explicitly deflationary. Starlin was more into wish-fulfilment fantasies of cosmic power, but he was droll and readable, and the scrupulous way he drew his psychedelia was actually (I see now, paging through the stuff) indebted to Steve Ditko’s early version of Doctor Strange. Enough. The point is, Gerber and Starlin were the two creators ...”

“... Side of Everything; Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions; Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking; The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations; Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us; Nudge: Improving Decisions about ...”

“... country could be one of the causes of social malaise because of its aggression towards those in power in civil society.’ Many of Lloyd’s criticisms of the BBC are hard to disagree with – a wearisome focus on personality and celebrity, a deficit of serious current affairs and arts programming – but the pressures of competing with commercial TV for ...”

“... One​ of Jonathan Swift’s first published poems was a piece of 18 lines called ‘A Description of the Morning’. It was printed anonymously in an April 1709 edition of the Tatler, which in its original incarnation took an interest in literary criticism, history and philosophy as well as society gossip. Richard Steele, the magazine’s editor and a friend of Swift’s, puffed the poet and his work in an introduction ...”

“... on bringing people along with you. And people are not levers you can pull. If anything, the power of the British executive to get its way in the teeth of opposition has been seriously diminished in recent years. The most effective weapon has been removed. Prime ministers used to have direct access to the off-switch. If all else failed, they could ...”

“... urban governments with high property-tax rates and progressive environmental policies wield great power (some say tyranny) over their rural hinterlands, delivering ukases about land use and conservation: brush-cutting is to be limited to 40 per cent of the property; ‘setbacks’ of 100 feet are required from streams and wetlands; new churches are denied ...”

“... respects remained medieval. On this basis, one might speculate that a diminution in the animating power of modernity would reverse the pattern: the arts would shed their blasphemous aura of sanctity and return to the classical tradition, and religion would reclaim the supernatural legitimacy it had exercised in the Middle Ages. Both of these developments ...”

“... for the ‘what’ of Foucault’s interests: the analysis of what he calls ‘the discourse of power’. But what of the ‘how’? It is not surprising, then, that Foucault’s own discourse tends to assume the form of what the critic Northrop Frye calls the ‘existential projection’ of a rhetorical trope into a metaphysics. This rhetorical trope is ...”

“... Jonathan Meades, for the last thirty years Britain’s most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment, has finally published a book on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television ...”