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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that it must be stopped. The spirit is sometimes called Structuralism, sometimes Deconstruction or Post-Structuralism. James Gribble’s book is a call to action: the teaching of literature, he argues, should be based upon the centrality of literary criticism. Literary criticism is ‘that form of discourse which undertakes the analysis of works of literature ...”

“... in modern fiction. In other respects, the novel is a disappointing performance. Jonathan Cape would apparently have us take Alice fell as a condition-of-England novel. Yet this national portentousness is refracted at the reader by fictional techniques which are distractingly mal à propos. Superficially, Alice fell is, in fact, scarcely a ...”

“... in an argument that conceives these pastoral leases as ‘sui generis grants’, in the words of Jonathan Fulcher, ‘designed for Australia’s unique conditions’ and, to this extent, ‘instruments unknown to the common law’. In the Kimberley region of Western Australia, some Aboriginal communities live in small fenced-off ‘excisions’ on large ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the tedium of a convincing topography, or nostalgia for the lost decencies. He’s busy, with this Post-Modern Sweeney Todd, reviving the shilling shocker – which, thanks to the confusion of the current publishing scene, appears between hardcovers and is reviewed in all the best places. The glory of Dan Leno is its relish for music-hall, the London ...”

“... the moment I’m rereading The Fourth Protocol,’ she happily tells a journalist. Rereading. Jonathan Miller talks of her ‘catering to the worst elements of commuter idiocy’ and one can see what he means. Hugo Young is the best political journalist writing in Britain today, and One of Us is likely to be the standard work for quite a while to ...”

“... forced to be that of the new – and not only for a few exiled intellos in Paris and London. As Jonathan Sperber has shown in The European Revolutions 1848-51,* the social and the national were intimately conjoined in the tragedy of 1848: ‘Ironically, it was the overthrow of the authoritarian pre-1848 regimes and the creation of a freer and more open ...”