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“... 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 ...”

“... affair illuminated the nature of the Saudi regime – modernising yet repressive, profligate with power – and for al-Rasheed, it also had a personal element. She and Khashoggi had clashed for years: in public debates, he was usually invited to speak first, toeing a pro-government line; she would respond by poking holes in narratives of Saudi ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... non-patrician. Fielding’s antipathy was partly conditioned by a dislike of the veristic power of Richardson’s novel: its pretence of ‘to the Moment’ narration by a participant in the thick of the action, its particularity of specification, and its thrusting of its readers into an intimacy with the narrative which Fielding seems to have ...”

“... Indeed, one of its now vanished Persian inscriptions proclaimed “Let him who doubts our power and munificence look upon our buildings.” ’ The student of Islamic architecture is everywhere confronted with the phenomenon of text-laden buildings – of inhabitable books made of stone, brick and stucco. A literate courtier walking through the palace ...”

“... work is at its best when he seems to forget himself, to forget his great mission to undo the power of words, an objective which he explained in a letter, written in German, to Axel Kaun in 1937: It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil ...”

“... published a week before the terrorist attacks, became a runaway bestseller, and the case against Jonathan Franzen and his kind of big social novel did not look so watertight. There may be something too wised-up about these novels, but interest in large-scale fiction has not fallen off after the attacks. Writers quickly settled back into familiar tracks; in ...”