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“... in Swift of the brake of pride upon the wheels of vanity. Before he saw England again, the fame, power, advancement and exhilaration he craved would all be his, to the point of suffocation. Every good thing but serenity lay in ambush. But the most important good thing did come. Swift’s triumph was to arrive at something which might look like this old ...”

“... the realms of the rich and the poor. In such circumstances, the principles of legitimacy on which power was to be held were constantly under review. In this sense, Italy was in the avant-garde of political thought in the modern world. Needless to say, wealth and fear threw up various alibis to make sure control remained in a limited number of hands. But if ...”

“... at least the middle of the 20th century. Can there be a proper history of working-class reading? Jonathan Rose believes that there can be, and after five hundred pages, 24 tables and more than 1600 footnotes it’s clear he has a point. His introduction (still more the publisher’s blurb) makes much of the book’s ‘innovative research techniques’, the ...”

“... Lorraine de Meaux’s about the Gunzburgs, ChaeRan Freeze’s on Zinaida Poliakova, and Jonathan Kaufman’s about the Sassoons and Kadoories – all use it. It plays to Old Testament stereotypes and fails to capture the experience of a woman such as Zlata Poliakova, whose commitment to providing her sons with an education in Russian and arithmetic ...”

“... employ or lay off hundreds of thousands of people. She knows this, and she knows they have the power to sink Third World economies. Half-understood, seemingly arbitrary actions may cause untold human suffering. She has no illusions about changing the system – she isn’t in any position to do so – but she disapproves of bankers on principle, just as ...”

“... shortfall – enough, anyway, for him to secure for himself a number two spot on the board and a power-sharing deal with Sugar, his new chairman. It was announced at the time that Venables would look after the XI on the field and Sugar would take care of the XI at the bank: Spurs owed about eleven million, rumour said. Venables, though, made it seem as if ...”

“... the nine seats they controlled in the Commons were at the heart of Lord Liverpool’s Westminster power base. No one had dared stand against them for more than forty years, but this time their opponent was formidable – Henry Brougham, an energetic liberal who promoted all the wrong causes – and the Lowthers weren’t the kind to leave anything to ...”

“... on their rucksacks as they criss-crossed Europe meeting up with pen pals and old army buddies. Jonathan Purkis, a self-described ‘vagabond sociologist’, sees hitchhiking as the inheritor of a long tradition celebrating self-sufficient travel, dating back to Lao Tzu’s aphorisms (the journey as more important than the destination) and medieval ...”

“... with death. No scene is too humdrum to be energised by the ubiquity of death. In Ghost MacIndoe, Jonathan Buckley introduces the war in the fifth line with the sentence: ‘The postman tipped his helmet to Alexander’s mother.’ The postman wears a helmet? Something is out there trying to kill postmen? That’s war, that is. The British Army still ...”

“... Mendle argues, MPs were concerned less to assert legislative rights than to seize executive power – though, aiming for ‘a very English absolutism’ they can look as insular in Mendle’s account as they do in Pocock’s. Pocock has retained his interest in the Civil Wars, particularly in their British dimension, but has ranged far beyond them. One ...”

“... he laces his work with environmental disasters and electrical surges. The sinister hum of power plants, and the invisible presence of radioactivity, undergird his storylines at all times. The ‘guardians of the atomic age’ have apparently bungled the job, and now we are all at risk. Under these conditions, the novelist must follow the fall-out ...”

“... I was an undergraduate, the beautiful dramatic Hawksmoor buildings were a locked enclave of male power and privilege, and I’d 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 ...”

“... and, in the playwright’s name, deploy a considered programme of anti-Jacobin propaganda. As Jonathan Bate has pointed out in an incisive study of the cultural politics of the period,* Hazlitt stands as the Radical to Coleridge’s Conservative in terms of a struggle for possession of Shakespeare that was a feature of British ideology between Waterloo ...”

“... himself? (As far as I can tell, he normally respects the fine line between fact and fiction. As Jonathan Coe noted in reviewing Sebald’s ‘novel’ The Emigrants in this paper, the authorial voice impresses us as one we come to recognise and feel we can trust.) Not too surprisingly, near Lowestoft station a hearse overtakes him, and he is put in mind of ...”

“... Sue Ellen’s name is not one to be taken lightly. In comparing her with a Mrs Hazel Pinder White, Jonathan Aitken brought on himself a legal action requiring him to kneel on the sand of Viking Bay, Broadstairs, and apologise publicly. JR’s wife, complained the plaintiff, ‘was nothing but a high-class prostitute who drank heavily and was a total ...”