“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... second wife there and began learning Portuguese. He covered the 2014 World Cup for the Washington Post and, two years later, reported on the Rio Olympics for the Guardian.In How to Save the Amazon (Bonnier, May 2025), the half-finished manuscript Phillips left behind which was completed by his friends and colleagues, the Guardian journalist ...”

“... say that there weren’t mishaps. In 2018, Musk may have produced the most expensive social media post of all time when he tweeted ‘Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured’ – a joke that made Tesla shares jump 11 per cent before traders realised that he wasn’t in earnest. The financial papers had to explain to their readers that ...”

“... never imagined that one day I would be invited in. I went to my head of department, the playwright Jonathan Lichtenstein, to ask what to do, as both posts would disrupt my ordinary schedule. He was pleased. Word came back from on high: prestige, publicity, glory, impact – I must do it. My teaching – I had seven PhD students, and undergraduate and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... recent fascination with such things as personal growth and Eastern mysticism is the result of a post-war survivalist mentality. Americans have retreated from politics into ‘transcendental self-attention’ because political failures and dehumanising social institutions have challenged their power to master reality. Thus detached, they perceive the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... like crazy but far, far behind his partner and her effortless flow of orgasms’, and apart from a post-credit sequence of copulating porcupines, chimps and farm animals (original footage from the Institute’s archive), it is the only reference to Kinsey’s home movies. The release of Kinsey has reignited an old controversy in the US. Conservative Christian ...”

“... the fall of empires in Europe, and the Little Ice Age did the same for the Ming dynasty in China. Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History (2023) studied plagues and their effects from the Stone Age to the present: it was a plague pandemic around 3000 BCE that cleared the way for the incursion into Europe of the Western Steppe ...”

“... disciplines with roots in the French 1940s were readily available to British aspirants. One was post-structuralism, which not many years earlier you’d have had to go to Paris or New Haven to hear about. Now you could pick up the rudiments of it in any university town, and though there was still an exciting whiff of controversy around ‘theory’, a topic ...”