“... 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 ...”

“... In reviewing a book on literary theory recently, a noted American structuralist, Jonathan Culler, drew a stern line between the sort of assumptions about literature that might do for ordinary ‘readers’ and those that are currently giving ‘vitality’, as he put it, to ‘literary studies’. The point is well taken; and it also casts a certain light on the present book, Deconstruction and Criticism, as well as on the general condition (and conditions) of American academic ‘vitality ...”

“... London or Paris, they came to assume that silence meant approval. That wasn’t always the case.To Jonathan Schneer, who has taught modern history in several American universities, ‘the Lockhart Plot seemed … an important subject; also, dramatic, romantic, intrinsically gripping.’ Dramatic and romantic it certainly was, and Schneer has made not one but ...”

“... the ageing mobster grandee in this book, is said to have led his family to ‘the very heights of power’, using only the instruments of ‘a Borgia-like cruelty and a Machiavellian subtleness, plus solid American business know-how’. He has also probably watched the Godfather movies several hundred times. How could we ever tire of such a figure, what would ...”

“... that Northern Ireland contained a large nationalist minority, excluded from any share in political power, which disputed the very existence of the state. This deferential approach was carried over to television when it arrived in 1953, and the rare controversies that arose usually involved material taken from London. In 1958, the BBC showed an interview with ...”

“... to squeeze whatever fun might be had.The stage was set for what Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, claimed would be ‘a change from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system’. The staff at Number Ten used, notoriously, to be no larger than the staff of a mayor in a middle-sized German town. Over the last decades, it has swelled ...”

“... man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival skills denied. If he is not forced out of office on corruption charges before July 2019, he will be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, overtaking Ben-Gurion. Israeli democracy, the marketing ...”

“... modus operandi that would increase his media celebrity. The veteran Washington Post correspondent Jonathan Randal, in his detailed and thoroughly researched biography Osama: The Making of a Terrorist, noted that in 1996 ‘he crossed the threshold from a war of words against Saudi Arabia and the United States and planning violent operations to executing his ...”

“... of Vincent Cronin’s laudatory 1955 biography, still in print today. He was also at the centre of Jonathan Spence’s 1984 study, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, which focused on Ricci’s use of the classical ars memoriae as a way of gaining access to members of China’s educated elite, whose interest in techniques that might help them memorise the ...”

“... one of its greatest chief justices, Bora Laskin.) The first beneficiary of this dispensation, Jonathan Sumption QC, a noted historian as well as a leading lawyer, was sworn in in January. Last November, after he had been appointed but before he had taken office, Sumption delivered one of the law’s more prestigious annual lectures to a packed audience in ...”

“... they have seen problems of sexual difference as women’s problems, addressing – to use Jonathan Culler’s terms – the issue of ‘reading as a woman’ but assuming that ‘reading as a man’ requires no attention. As a result, much male feminist criticism has inadvertently reproduced patriarchal attitudes to women, appropriating or challenging ...”

“... on claims that a concern to maintain racial purity increasingly trumped other social ambitions; Jonathan Parry offers a careful account of the decline of institutional reform. All these historians are reliable, sober and meticulous. But they appear to have forgotten that we need strong arguments, even wrong arguments: the job of the historian is to make a ...”

“... sense that had no constitutional legitimacy at the time, and implied an alarming concentration of power – there was nothing innocent about the joke. Walpole’s self-promotion was a standard target, but Fielding’s sly participle gave a new twist to the usual complaint, and suggests how unlike a ministering angel an exponent of prime ministering might ...”