“... deconstructive reading is an interpretation of the text, an analysis of what it says or means.’ Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, according to Culler, have turned deconstruction into a ‘methodological principle’ by which semantic ‘undecidability’ is, as Miller puts it, ‘always thematised in the text itself ...’ In other words, deconstructionist ...”

“... By the end of the sequence it’s clear that only someone like the unctuous and obnoxious Canon Paul Fenneau is still talking about the music of time: ‘To those familiar with the rhythm of living there are few surprises in this world.’ To everyone else, there is scarcely anything except surprises. Jenkins even manages, while on military service during ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not ...”

“... might have done better if mixed with economists of other views like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Obama knew little economics, however, and he took the word of the orthodox. It would have been wiser, from a merely prudential standpoint, to consult Summers behind a screen. But Obama has always craved legitimacy in a conspicuous form. He is a ...”

“... his scholarship: he led the Council of Economic Advisers from 1961 to 1964, under Kennedy then Johnson, and had been economic adviser to Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign until, just a week before the debate in New York, it ended with the election of Richard Nixon. Friedman had been closely involved with Barry Goldwater’s ...”

“... however, inaugurating the fifth party system, whose divisions were further exacerbated by Lyndon Johnson’s social reforms in the 1960s and by the Reaganite counter-revolution which followed in the 1980s. Americans now find themselves in the middle of a further realignment which has put paid not only to the post-New Deal system, but also to an entrenched ...”

“... panics over the oligarchs’ alleged attempts to sway the political process in the West. Both Johnson’s Conservatives and Trump’s Republicans were accused of being in thrall to them. Johnson spent a weekend at the Italian villa of Alexander Lebedev, like Putin a former KGB officer, without any aides present, and ...”

“... soft power, and an indication that it should continue to offer free licences to the over-75s. Johnson floated the idea of a licence fee review during the campaign: it looked at the time like unsubtle intimidation, or cheap showmanship. His refusal to be interviewed by Andrew Neil, and his insistence that ministers boycott the Today programme (now ...”

“... myth for the left, but also for the new, postwar right, some of whom hoped to recapture what Boris Johnson calls ‘the Churchill factor’.From the 1960s onwards many ‘revisionist’ historians sought to dismantle this myth. They combed through newly available archives and explicated the logic of the civil servants who had written neat papers explaining why ...”

“... portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney; a play about him was performed at the Theatre Royal; he learned to play chess and backgammon, and many agreed with Mrs Thrale’s comment about the ‘savage’s good breeding’. Banks delighted in showing him off: an aristocratic ...”

“... anxiety and grief which readers conveyed to Richardson or to Dickens over the fate of Clarissa or Paul Dombey (whose death ‘threw a whole nation into mourning’) is disconcertingly replicated in popular responses to radio and TV soap-operas. What Flaubert was to extol as novelistic ‘illusion’ has obvious affinities with the hoax and other forms of ...”

“... earlier on the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum, issued in the Counter-Reformation pontificate of Paul IV, on the suspect grounds that they had fuelled the corruption of French politics. In the preface to the Six Books of the Commonwealth of 1576, Jean Bodin talks of ‘the delightful principles of Machiavelli, who lays down impiety and injustice as dual ...”

“... Executive with David Austin (who would become a lifelong collaborator) and Ridgeley’s brother Paul. Michael was lead vocalist but hadn’t yet found the right style: his attempts at a Jamaican accent fell flat. A fifth member, Andrew Leaver, directed homophobic slurs at James Sullivan, a gay American student friend in whom Michael had confided his ...”

“... of Venus (1806), were perfect expressions of feminine talent, according to the critic Charles-Paul Landon, whereas ‘ambitious, moving, and often terrible conceptions’ wouldn’t have been. In Britain, Cosway was scolded for attempting ‘grand or horrible’ narratives (those closest in aesthetic to the Burkean sublime), once being informed that her ...”

“... the ways in which words are used change and evolve – or, as he sees it, decline. But even Dr Johnson, who hoped his dictionary would fix the language, recognised that this was in part a futile wish. The question is: is change necessarily decay? Two articles, by Geoffrey Nunberg and Sylvia Adamson, explore the issue in far more sophisticated, informed and ...”