“... cultural critic, interpreter of Aids, cancer, the cinema, Fascism and pornography, recipient of Jonathan Miller’s burdensome accolade ‘probably the most intelligent woman in America’, why should she want to attempt a historical novel? It’s been a success of course. There have been the entries into the bestseller lists, the interviews and profiles in ...”

“... England was, in the memorable phrase of Sellar and Yeatman, ‘Top Nation’: both an imperial power and the first industrial nation. Sellar and Yeatman’s comic masterpiece 1066 and All That (1930) poked fun at England’s not quite nationalism. But if it’s not nationalism, how should we describe England’s distinctive sense of self? Probably the most ...”

“... be, otherwise we American male novelists wouldn’t keep writing books about them. Let us observe Jonathan Franzen’s latest, in which the eco-maniacal egghead, at long last, gets the girl. Or Jonathan Lethem’s stoned underachievers, with their mad ideas that turn out to be right. David Foster Wallace gave us ...”

“... These biographies of John Gielgud by Jonathan Croall and Sheridan Morley are quite hard to tell apart. They are of much the same size, bear handsome pictures of the actor in old age on the front of their dust-jackets, and are, inevitably, affectionate and indulgent towards their subject. As Dirk Bogarde remarked when Croall consulted him about the work in hand, ‘everybody adored him, so the book might make rather flat reading ...”

“... to experimental testing. That became the conventional wisdom among evolutionists. But no longer. Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist, takes the dispute between Gould and Conway Morris as the starting point for his richly detailed account of pioneering research in experimental evolution. Recent studies, based on field observations as well as direct ...”

“... that these pleasures are only by-products of the process which is currently concentrating economic power in the hands of a ‘cosmopolitan upper class’ – a small global plutocracy which threatens to undermine democratic welfare states by ensuring that a country which tries to protect its poor from exploitation will end up by depriving them of jobs. There ...”

“... inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being made right in front of him. He couldn’t see it for its ubiquity. Here was the distinctive architecture of its time, derived from countless precedents, with ...”

“... he allow him to discover it through the intercession of the wise woman? Did she really have the power to conjure demons from the depths, and if so which side was she working for? How could she compel the spirit of Samuel to appear at her bidding, and anyway what was he doing in the underworld when he should have been in heaven with the Lord? Saul’s ...”

“... here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out to the whole world and holds it in his power.’ The following day, 14 October 1806, parts of the city were ransacked in what came to be called the Battle of Jena. Soldiers entered Hegel’s rooms and, as he put it, ‘mixed up my papers like lottery tickets’. But the manuscripts of the ...”

“... less significant than they might be. The SDR suggested that the military focus more on ‘the power of drones, AI and autonomy’ to paper over its inability to recruit. Drone tactics conducted by Ukraine should be adopted by the British army. Six new munitions factories should be built to increase shell production. The report also recommended that a new ...”

“... the strategies adopted by these institutions are debated more widely and more knowledgeably. Both Jonathan Steele’s book and John Gray’s essay sharpen a critique which has so far been fragmentary and diffuse. They articulate deeply-felt arguments against the type of reform Russia is undergoing and warn of the dangers of social upheaval if it continues in ...”

“... parable. Last month, two novels appeared which suggest that this process may already be under way. Jonathan Raban’s Foreign Land and Black Marina by Emma Tennant are, from the formal standpoint, very different kinds of novel, but they share, quite strikingly, an un-English pre-occupation with the problem for the individual of belonging in the modern ...”

“... commission of an act of terrorism. They do not need to have grounds for suspicion to exercise this power. What this means in practice is that the police are allowed to stop you for any reason, but don’t have to disclose it. They can question you for up to six hours. You have no right to silence. I have been in this situation on a number of occasions and the ...”

“... on below-stairs life: most notably Pamela Horn on The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s history of the British nanny (which puts Churchill’s Mrs Everest firmly in her place), and Merlin Waterson’s account of Erdigg, which tells the entire story of a country house from the servants’ standpoint. Above stairs, Mark ...”

“... of his marriage; the truth is that ‘he wanted to see the world for itself. He wanted to see power naked. He wanted to see how bad it was.’ Costello’s legal training shows in his fiction. He writes easily about crooks, priests, lawyers, politicians, victims. And he knows how the world works: how the law works, how the police work, how ...”