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“... 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 ...”

“... the ‘thief-taker’, who was seen as the blood brother rather than the enemy of the criminal. Jonathan Wild, the most famous thief-taker of the 18th century, who recovered stolen goods for a fee, was a crook. There was still something sinister about the detective in Dickens’s day. When Conan Doyle turned the detective into a gentleman, it was to point ...”

“... and Labour itself had become a governing party. The spoils of office, the potentialities of power, were now at stake. The 1951 Election marked a turning-point in British politics, as well as being a demonstration of the vagaries of the British political system and a portent of the penalties exacted from parties which give up, and of the prizes awarded ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be topical, to dramatise a few ...”