“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... genius looks, if no less talented, less solitary: first among equals, or maybe just first past the post. That is what happened to rock music in the late 1960s, when sophisticated critics decided, as Richard Poirier put it, to start ‘learning from the Beatles’. It is what happened to comics, too, in the early 1990s, when the Pulitzer Prize committee ...”

“... agreed without a fight. ‘Next I tried to convince Gorbachev to abandon the idea of combining the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party with President of the Soviet Union.’ Gorbachev ‘did not reject my proposal out of hand. He even sought my advice: Perhaps I ought to run for president in Soviet Union-wide elections?’ What we see here is ...”

“... would be ‘honest thief-takers’, not the kind in The Beggar’s Opera, or in Fielding’s novel Jonathan Wild, who colluded with criminals until it became expedient to hand them over to justice. In the early years of the runners some worked as prison turnkeys; others had unexpected former careers: one was an ex-pickpocket, and one a highwayman who had ...”

“... there can’t have been very much anger because the novel wasn’t banned, or even expurgated. Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post praised Mo Yan for having ‘spoken out courageously for freedom and individualism’. Here was a liberal voice in repressive China. ‘The Swedish Academy, which leaps at any chance to ...”

“... you might get a vast informational department store like the New York Times, the Washington Post or the LA Times, but the great cities in between had their equivalents, from the Chicago Tribune to the Arizona Republic. If you were British, you might buy one of this country’s bitterly competitive national counterparts, such as the Telegraph, Times or ...”

“... mercenaries, available to oppose China’s army of 2.5 million, or by a onesided treaty which no post-Qing Chinese government has ever recognised. The economies of China and Hong Kong were even then closely entwined (as those of China and Taiwan have never been). British pomp and circumstance camouflaged a simple truth: Hong Kong was there by Chinese ...”

“... overcoming all the gender-based habits and assumptions imposed by a rigidly patriarchal culture? Jonathan Culler argues as much in the opening chapters of his recent book On Deconstruction. For Culler, this serves as a paradigm case of the way that deconstructionist strategies of reading can work to undo such naturalised categories as ‘male’ versus ...”