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“... control pills.)The naughtiest thought I had while reading was that the novel recalls the work of Jonathan Franzen. Among young writers online, this is more controversial than any sex thing you can come up with. But less au courant readers will find the careful rendering of emotional detail, and sweeping narrative arc, comfortingly familiar from other good ...”

“... though curiously, in this view, without art. Writing about De Vos in the TLS, the historian Jonathan Israel argued that, far from being unconnected with the real world, Memling provided the art appropriate to give quasi-legitimacy to new men: his patrons were ambitious arrivistes in the employ of the ducal court. Memling, in Israel’s words, quite ...”

“... a crusade against ball-tampering in general. The Times called for Atherton’s resignation, as did Jonathan Agnew, the BBC’s chief cricket correspondent. In the end, though, Atherton’s defenders in the media outnumbered his detractors. Most felt his offence was a minor one, and that he was more foolish than criminal. On the Friday following the Lord’s ...”

“... the Theatre Royal in London staged a ‘solidarity rally’ for British Jews. The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, scolded the press for blaming the events of 11 September on Israel. Would they, he asked, like to live in ‘Gaza under the Palestinian Authority, Afghanistan under the Taliban, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Iran or Libya or Syria’? Or would they ...”

“... would engage in a ‘long-running and increasingly public slanging-match’, which, as Jonathan Parry notes in The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy, ‘both men found immensely life-enhancing’. If Cowling was not taken altogether seriously in the higher reaches of the Conservative Party, he was nevertheless influential as a ...”

“... distillation of what has become a clash of narratives as books about Joy Division, Manchester and post-punk proliferate. The word fans settled on to describe the band’s sound was ‘industrial’, not least because they came from Manchester, everywhere described as the world’s first industrial city. By the late 1970s, its mills, canals, factories and ...”

“... his wife) was the dedicatee of one of the most celebrated megaliths of the past quarter-century, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections? Of course not. Or that Means had worried, not unreasonably, that the idea of ‘going big and wide for the sake of giving into the possibility’ was for him the succubus of an unholy temptation? No. Did it matter, even, that ...”

“... hear the crash of ladders distinctly near home as the book comes to deal with structuralist and post-structuralist theory. Gone is the Althusserian quest for a ‘science’ of the text and its productive mechanisms, the project which Eagleton resourcefully argued in Criticism and Ideology (1976). As that scientistic dream receded, so the influence of ...”

“... to squeeze whatever fun might be had.The stage was set for what Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, claimed would be ‘a change from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system’. The staff at Number Ten used, notoriously, to be no larger than the staff of a mayor in a middle-sized German town. Over the last decades, it has swelled ...”

“... Astrachan and Hedrick Smith of the New York Times, Robert Kaiser and Kevin Klose of the Washington Post, David Satter of the Financial Times and the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Denis Blakeley. Reading the list, I found myself mentally running through the names of noted Moscow correspondents of the era to see who, if anyone, had not been enlisted in the ...”

“... Howl, are all ‘published in Heaven’. You won’t find his tributes to Gordon Lish (pen-pal) or Jonathan Meades (doorstepped) in any literary periodical. If you tracked down the originals, you might spot some of the elements that dress Seabrook’s whippy style: the Meades-to-camera performed prose, the music-hall delivery of arcane information. Seabrook is ...”

“... mental confusion. ‘He is no longer a full person,’ the South African cartoonist Zapiro – Jonathan Shapiro – remarked in 2008, after a private interview with Mandela. He was later given flak for showing Mandela in his sickbed with the country by his side anxiously holding his hand. Mandela’s speech bubble read: ‘I know it’s hard, but we have ...”

“... they’d like to know. In his recent book of American peregrinations, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Jonathan Raban fetches up amid the small, insular community of Guntersville, Alabama, where he meets a young motel-owner called Tim. Tim is writing a novel. Raban is consulted for a professional opinion of the work in progress, and with commendable grace he ...”

“... How bad will it be? In a paper to a recent conference in Durban on the economic impact of Aids, Jonathan Broomberg, Malcolm Steinberg and Patrick Masobe constructed a complex actuarial model to take into account the fact that the epidemic’s doubling time is likely to slow down as it progresses. In the very early stages the number of adults aged 15-34 who ...”

“... garde, concerned with shaping and directing the ‘consciousness revolution’, Ecstasy, in its post-Shulgin incarnation, has been a resoundingly democratic drug. Collin and Godfrey emphasise the diversity of its devotees, from snobbish New Romantic starlets in the VIP rooms of mid-Eighties London nightclubs to itinerant thieves on the beaches of Ibiza. A ...”