“... 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 ...”

“... Christian militias from the western half of the city, gutting, looting and burning as they went. Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post, the only one of us to see the inevitability of civil war, evacuated the Saint Georges to take refuge in our new press corps HQ, the Hotel Commodore. Another Commodore arrival was Rob ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in a moment, is now barely in evidence. This is not an aesthetic judgment. Like Zionism itself, post-1948 Palestinian nationalism has had to achieve formal and ideological prominence well before any actual land has been gained. Strange nationalisms these, conducted for years in exile and alienation, for years projective, stubborn, passionately believed ...”

“... Adult responsibilities are represented as almost unbelievably dull. In The Society of the Poem Jonathan Raban argued that a significant number of post-Movement poets accepted the daily rituals of the postwar world as nearly sufficient for the inner life: ‘The imprints of the same mass images, the same commuting ...”

“... and contend with feminism, female precursors, and male and female rivals. As we move through the post-feminist period of gender redefinition that always seems to accompany the end of a century, we need a much more complex analysis of the ways that male sexuality and writing intersect. We need studies of the representation of masculinity to put alongside ...”

“... He was sensing the possibilities that were to come to fruition in the European Community.’ And Jonathan Spence, discussing The Temptation of the West, a supposed exchange of letters between ‘AD’, a Frenchman, and his Chinese correspondent ‘Ling’, is more venturesome still, It is never safe, and often folly,’ he admits, ‘to call any writing ...”

“... potential and heavy drinking. When the book opens she is compulsively monitoring a Facebook post by a woman called Taylor Birch, who has revived an accusation of sexual assault against a former high school teacher. Taylor first made her allegation more than a decade earlier, when she was 14, but this time people are listening. The accused is Jacob ...”

“... forms of sonority and verbal intensity. As a medieval Catholic writer, Dante was foreign to post-Reformation English taste, not only in England but in the United States. Longfellow’s 1867 translation of the Commedia revived Dante in America; T.S. Eliot’s polemical espousing of Dante’s austere sense of the world (more congenial to him than ...”

“... for a naked lightbulb in the loo of a coffee-shop on Brick Lane – the height of reverse chic and Post-Modern marketing style. The sex stereotyping of Victorian retail still prevails, though in a different guise. Real men apparently won’t walk through racks of women’s clothes, so men’s gear has to be at the front of the shop or on the ground ...”

“... upbringing of Hermsprong among the Nawdoessie, close to Fort Michillimackinac, the main trading post linking the eastern and western Great Lakes region, Bage gives evidence of familiarity with several of the principal contemporary accounts of Native Americans by European travellers. These covered a wide spectrum of opinion. In fiction, they ranged from the ...”

“... simply as a piece of Cold War kitsch, yet after decades of exile in the darkest corners of the post-Zapruder national imagination, it breathed with a forbidden vitality, reanimating familiar fears. Why didn’t the film feel safely trapped in history? Part of the answer is to do with its still shimmering quality. The film was an alchemical success: Frank ...”

“... This revelation played a crucial (if somewhat opaque) role in motivating his vision of a new, post-Christian morality. Nietzsche’s innovation prompted a huge cultural shift towards subversive genealogical thinking – what might be called the ‘Genealogical Turn’ – including Freudian analysis, 20th-century Marxism, Foucault’s historical ...”