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“... 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 ...”

“... the same reason. He was also the undeclared reviewer of one of his own novels in the Yorkshire Post. Thomas Gray’s Elegy, the most frequently reprinted poem of 18th-century England, was published anonymously. With becoming modesty, Sense and Sensibility was advertised as ‘By a Lady’, a common enough ascription at the time. None of Austen’s other ...”

“... paedophilia, venereal disease and voyeurism’. The novel also lends itself wonderfully well to post-structuralism, since like a lot of Irish writing it is fascinated by writing. It has been argued that the typewriter is one of its leading characters, and the book is stuffed with documents, telegrams, title deeds and state-of-the-art reproductive technology ...”

“... not just in 1758, as Battestin records, but two years earlier in the Whitehall Evening-Post. Like Dryden, Fielding also had princes to contend with, and opportunities and constraints involved in writing for, about and against the holders of political power provide the trickiest interpretative issue confronted by Battestin and Lockwood. The ...”

“... of Heaven – it centres on a massacre of a herd of elephants by Waïtari, a deracinated would-be post-independence leader – gives Morel a chance to explain himself. (The Conradian speakers round the campfire have temporarily been forgotten.) We already know he’s a former member of the French Resistance who learned to love elephants in a German ...”

“... we’re just bluffing.’ What happened in October 2002 is that both Governments, according to Jonathan Pollack, a knowledgable specialist writing in the Naval War College Review, ‘opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes’, and so to unravel ‘close to a decade of painfully crafted diplomatic arrangements designed to prevent full-scale ...”

“... Apart from the editor’s obtrusive commentaries, this consists of lectures given at the Jonathan Institute in Washington by George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Arthur Goldberg, Moshe Arens, Eugene Rostow, Paul Johnson, Senator Cranston and many others with similar views. The blurb describes the book as a polemic, which it is, and ‘a comprehensive ...”

“... such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in 1910, the year he ...”

“... monarchy; for the loyalists, his rebellion prefigured that of the American colonists. As Jonathan Odell described it in his satire, The American Times: What Michael to the first arch-rebel said, Would well rebuke the rebel army’s head; What Satan to th’ angelic Prince replied, Such are the words of Continental pride. Ellen White used Paradise ...”