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“... necessarily involved negotiated compromises: because it needed legitimacy, it had to possess a power not primarily coercive but consensual. To sustain hegemonic authority, the law had to be (more or less) accepted by the man in the street – anyone likely to be robbed or mugged and any potential juryman. After all, nobodies as well as nobs had their stuff ...”

“... author has donated far too much of her time to media book-gabble and the smokefree backrooms of power. Indeed, she could be said to have invented a new form of fiction – whereby the promotional interviews are conducted within the text. The phobia about the Thames flooding through the Greenwich foot tunnel suffered by the wimpish Frances Peverell signals ...”

“... of Old Europe loathes Parker, and for reasons not dissimilar to those for the hatred of Bush: the power both are seen to wield is as coercive as it is crude and clumsy. The numbers do not tell the whole story here: indeed, the numbers may be a red herring. Between a 20-point scale and a 51-point scale (which is what Parker’s amounts to), the issue can ...”

“... realise. We don’t merely change over time, we (more grandly) grow. In this collection of essays Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, wants to show us that it is what he calls the ‘logic of the soul’ to want open-mindedness; and this is because, in his view (and in the tradition of psychoanalysis that he values), the logic of the soul is a ...”

“... History’ is a case in point. Herbert Butterfield slew it in 1931, and here come John Pocock and Jonathan Clark to slay it again. There is next to nothing in common between them, save their opposition to the Whig Interpretation and its offspring: but it is that opposition which provides both of them with the structure of their argument and the dramatic ...”

“... still fell to the inevitable; and last year he saw off Fabiano Caruana to retain the title. Brin-Jonathan Butler’s The Grandmaster, which focuses on the Karjakin match, doesn’t provide any evidence that it ‘made chess great again’, despite the book’s subtitle. The match left the peak of the chess world undisturbed. The main surprise was that ...”

“... any good, either, which is to overlook not only the work of such writers as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, but also Ronald Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica, a TV series that’s as intelligent, nuanced and unflinching an examination of the United States’ post-9/11 militarism, foreign policy and relation to the un-American other as you are ...”

“... normal media service resumed. This, too, was a miscalculation by the grand manipulator. As his power slipped away, opinion-formers wheeled and squawked. For 24 hours, friendly journalists stuck to Mandelson’s script and tried to deflect attention onto Brown; they then covered Mandelson’s resignation with wistful predictions of his return. Routledge ...”

“... Turpentine. Turpentine and linseed oil.’ Which, indeed, turns out to be significant. The power children (and adolescents like Stella) can have over adults is usually presented as something sinister. One variant shows the young as the occasion of supernatural occurrences – poltergeists, ghosts and so forth. Another (seen in A High Wind in ...”

“... in the shit waiting for me to strike them down.’ This is powerful enough, but achieves its power at the risk of leaving the reader a bit nonplussed – it’s as if Tom is so shocked at what is going on that we feel our own response has been pre-empted. The ending, though, shows some of the subtler corruption spread by incest, and came as a nasty ...”

“... tendency to bring on rashes of mass nostalgia. That the Molesworth books have this nostalgic power and cult status is testament to their cleverness: but it also sets a limit on their achievement – it’s the reason that they’re not, as Hensher claims they are, ‘works of sublime genius’ with a ‘ferocious satirical bite’. They purport to view ...”

“... into such base metal. Many times since then the public pronouncements of ministers have shown the power of this alchemy: we have heard independent educators extolling the virtues of comprehensive schools, anti-Europeans suddenly beginning to defend the EEC, former Israeli sympathisers arguing the Arab case, conservative economists seeing the virtues of ...”

“... Line workers separate the carcasses. Both types of work exact a physical and psychic toll, what Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennett call ‘the hidden injuries of class’. On the kill floors, most workers are ‘at-will’ employees and can be fired at any time. In 2019, the annual turnover in many Texan slaughterhouses was 100 per cent.The ethnographer ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sense of decline has encouraged Anglo-Saxon historians to ‘decentre’ their investigations. As power ebbs from London to Brussels, Dublin and now Edinburgh, it is tempting ‘to deny that English history makes any kind of sense, or contains within itself any of the motors of its own dynamic or the causes of its own crises’. While the turn to ‘British ...”