“... 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 ...”

“... Scots sitting for English seats) – is in thrall to imperial nostalgia, has delusions of Great Power status, has never felt itself to be European, has a victim mentality, has a contemptuous attitude to Ireland as its former possession, has lost any talent it once had for compromise and pragmatism, has become unmoored from reality. Pankaj Mishra in the New ...”

“... for members of Parliament, whose job is to represent us, and who, collectively, are the sovereign power. In practice, though, it doesn’t quite work like that. We the electors vote for MPs, who regard their primary role as being representatives of their political party, and who pay just enough attention to their electorate in order to get re-elected. In ...”

“... smart arse’. Generally, his sympathies wax inversely with people’s proximity to wealth and power. This extends, to some degree, to his perception of himself. Admittedly, on Mullin’s testimony, power seldom looks alluring. The distended egos of New Labour grandees such as Peter Mandelson, and especially ...”

“... does the FBI keep files on? Is there a filing cabinet in Washington that contains a rundown of Jonathan Franzen’s feud with Oprah Winfrey? Do the Feds keep track of how many words Joyce Carol Oates writes in a day? Do they monitor Karl Ove Knausgaard’s border crossings? Did they know who Elena Ferrante was before the editors of the New York Review of ...”

“... rise of capitalism, the emergence of a career nobility, the venality of offices), central state power in many European nations was remarkably resilient. The rise of bureaucracy, standing armies, Erastianism and centralised taxation – all strengthened the hand of government. Though habitually written off as sick men, as anachronisms, many European ...”

“... Things were much calmer until the end of the 1990s, when the Institutional Revolutionary Party, in power since the revolution, and the cartels had a tacit agreement: drugs were not to be sold locally but could pass through Mexico, and the murders necessary for the smooth running of business were to be conducted discreetly, without disturbing the daily lives of ...”

“... a thesaurus for The Media Casebook, while Sage spins around the colon to distinguish Culture and Power: A Media, Culture & Society Reader from Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader. For the benefit of anyone who hadn’t picked up on the family resemblance, Finkelstein and McCleery call their anthology of ‘book history studies’ ‘a vital ...”