“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Dark Vanessa begins in late 2017, as a wave of allegations of sexual harassment against men in power is starting to swell. Vanessa Wye is a 32-year-old concierge at a hotel in Portland, Maine, leading a solitary life of squandered potential and heavy drinking. When the book opens she is compulsively monitoring a Facebook post by a woman called Taylor ...”

“... Condon’s cheaply paranoid fantasy, past its limits.’ And part of the answer is to do with the power of that fantasy, the way in which The Manchurian Candidate links into the enduring pattern of paranoid politics in America. Despite its talk of Communists, The Manchurian Candidate is not a properly political film. In it, being a Communist means having ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sight’, another is ‘Alice in Wonderland syndrome’; naturally it has been suggested that Jonathan Swift may have experienced it during his demented final years, while Charles Dodgson may have based Alice’s distortions of scale on an account of mushroom-eating Siberian shamans in Mordecai Cooke’s drug compendium, Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860). The ...”