“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... techniques of electoral fraud, corruption, clientilism and intimidation, relying either on local power-brokers or perhaps a proactive ministry of the interior? Or should they take a huge risk and develop ‘mass competitive political parties’ able to ‘win “clean” elections’? In countries where conservative forces saw politics in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... very dear to them, and did so at just the right time. That was the key. Had she come to power in 1960 or 1970 she would have failed – she had no second suit – but by 1979 the foundering of old social solidarities and, with them, the postwar consensus opened the way to her simplistic truths: Victorian values and all the rest. Mark Hollingsworth ...”

“... view of the relationship between Greek cultural nostalgia and the realities of Roman economic power,’ because the satirical jibes are usually founded on a literary allusion. So exaggeration and literary sophistication are incompatible with social critique? For sure, Lucian doesn’t give a ‘balanced’ view, but then neither does Sacha Baron Cohen or ...”

“... goal, the overall casualty rate was astonishing. Historians’ estimates range from 37 per cent (Jonathan Riley-Smith) to as high as 75 per cent (John France), with illness and starvation causing more deaths than combat. Women faced the additional hazard of pregnancy, which could be life-threatening at the best of times, and, like men, they could be taken ...”

“... He was sensing the possibilities that were to come to fruition in the European Community.’ And Jonathan Spence, discussing The Temptation of the West, a supposed exchange of letters between ‘AD’, a Frenchman, and his Chinese correspondent ‘Ling’, is more venturesome still, It is never safe, and often folly,’ he admits, ‘to call any writing ...”

“... Blessed is he whose mind had power to probe/The causes of things,’ Virgil wrote, thinking of Lucretius. But for many, knowing the causal origins of things can be reason for anxiety. Just as we might worry that tracing our family trees will turn up slave owners or madmen, we might also worry that genealogical investigation into our most cherished beliefs, values and practices will reveal what Nietzsche called pudenda origo, a shameful origin ...”