“... Ayatollah Montazeri seemed to have been Khomeini’s (and Khomeini’s son’s) favourite for the post, a dispute about his ability to continue the old revolutionary’s policies arose a few years ago. In an article on the present crisis that appeared in the New York Review of Books (15 January) Shaul Bakhash reported on the increased presence in Teheran of ...”

“... is to swell the payroll vote, and spout stultifying drivel. In 1999, Blair calls to offer Mullin a post as a bottom-ranking minister. First he accepts. Next day he resigns. Blair gets back on the phone. He dangles the prospect of promotion to minister of state sooner rather than later. Mullin accepts again. He quits as chair of the Home Affairs Select ...”

“... of couples. Kundera regularly gets clobbered for misogyny – or recently, more mildly, by Jonathan Coe in the Guardian, for ‘androcentrism’ – but I don’t think it’s that. If you wanted a word it would be gamogenetic: it’s about couples and coupling. Everyone in his books is a sexual actor or a sexual cipher, the men as much as the ...”

“... Butler’s part, because Blair was already determined to seed his own placemen (Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell) inside the government machine to have it do his bidding. But in fact it seems about right: Blair was scared of the hard work involved in getting the civil service on his side. He was always looking for short cuts. The result was an administration ...”

“... female acolyte, signalled by walks in Central Park, evenings at red sauce Italian restaurants, and Jonathan Schwartz and the Great American Songbook on the radio. When they meet, in 2002, Ezra is in his late sixties. Alice is 25, but everyone tells her she looks 16. Ezra dusts off his old Polaroid SX-70 and shoots her topless, the Chrysler Building shining ...”

“... That is only an expression. I do not have a literary life different from any other life.’ Jonathan Franzen did his part in 2010, with a rapturous essay in the New York Times about the same book. ‘I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people in this country who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to ...”

“... of amnesia (or megalomania). The exclusion of Dorothea Tanning as of every other exponent of post-de Chirico Surrealism suppresses a key part of the story. The exclusion of Josef Albers shows bias. The exclusion of Mark di Suvero means the omission of the one artist (David Smith is something else) who has created a sculptural equivalent of Abstract ...”

“... passion into refinement’ and that the discourse of deportment rendered citizens amenable to the post-revolutionary government, keeping both painters and consumers in their places. The chapters focus on social events embodying that discourse: the development of small group portraits (the ‘conversation piece’) in the 1720s, of public pleasure gardens in ...”

“... Wordsworth’s early poetry has fostered some of the most sophisticated and wide-ranging post-war criticism in English. The three editions of Lyrical Ballads published in the Sixties for use in university teaching furthered this work, and from a scholarly point of view usefully complemented each other: W.J.B. Owen (1967) used the 1798 text, Derek ...”

“... roots has accordingly not bulked large in arguments over the American Revolution. Now that Jonathan Clark has discovered America, however, religion becomes the centrepiece of an interpretation which banishes all other explanations as anachronistic or incomplete. Clark is the man who put the Tory back into British history with his iconoclastic account ...”

“... short on analysis and reflection. If Britain is by German and Japanese standards an inefficient post-industrial slum, our politicians and administrators have no doubt failed to stop it. What is less clear – and it’s a question which Ponting never stops to ask – is whether there was very much they could have done about it, and if so when. Was there ...”

“... work O.M. Manning, but it was as Olivia Manning that in 1937 she published The Wind Changes with Jonathan Cape. In being acquired by Cape, Manning made an acquisition of her own. More striking than beautiful, with down-turned dark eyes and very slender legs, she was extremely interested in sex, and the more of it she experienced the more fashionably ...”

“... As Diderot himself later acknowledged, ‘we had contemporaries during the age of Louis XIV’ (Jonathan Israel has recently restated this argument in a new form in Radical Enlightenment, focusing on the Netherlands and the circle of Spinoza). Brockliss takes a different tack. He wants to show, first, that the Republic of Letters survived into the late 18th ...”

“... another biography of Marx to go alongside the many we already have? The justification given by Jonathan Sperber is compelling. Previous accounts of Marx’s life have gone one of two ways. Either he is seen as a prophet of modern times, a seer whose theories help us understand the predicament we are in, especially in times of economic crisis, an ...”

“... have waited a long time for the definitive full-scale scholarly biography of Charles Lamb,’ Jonathan Bate asserts on the back cover of Eric Wilson’s book, ‘but now it has arrived.’ In fact, there is more good sense in Bate’s short introduction to the 1987 Oxford edition of the Essays of Elia than in Wilson’s 521 pages. I thought it was ...”