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“... 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 ...”

“... own terms. Most of his income has been re-invested in technical equipment so that he can work on post-production in what is effectively his own personal facility house. He still averages a ruminative new feature every three or four years, while devoting the bulk of his energy to the massive eight-part video epic Histoire(s) du Cinéma, a protracted ...”

“... manpads, were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter. ‘The Obama administration,’ Warrick wrote, ‘has steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such ...”

“... announced in 1979 that ‘Japan has dealt more successfully with more of the basic problems of post-industrial society than any other country.’ The Japanese themselves, he told them, had been too modest about their achievements. It was time they realised that in the overall effectiveness of their institutions, they were ‘indisputably number ...”

“... such challenges and responses. London’s experience is not unique. A few years ago the Washington Post reported problems, recognisable to Londoners, which were affecting the Washington Metro:When the Metro was built moving staircases got preference over regular staircases because, engineers figured, they would transport passengers to and from trains more ...”