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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have been a bid for his patronage. It was not until The Adventures of Eovaai in 1736, in which a power-crazed minister seduces the nation away from civic virtue, that Haywood emerges as an anti-Walpole satirist, and even here the underlying ideology is that of a reformist ‘Patriot’ opposition, not the Tory-Jacobite fringe. She pursued this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... disturbed more Victorian readers than any of his peers. We can still register the disconcerting power of Carlyle as an almost Nietzschean anti-moralist; it’s much harder to appreciate why so many found him an inspiringly positive moral guide. Yet for numbers of the earnest young in the 1830s and 1840s, in particular, Carlyle’s writing was a summons to ...”

“... and Thinking, as well as his claim that ‘in the end, philosophy’s business is to safeguard the power of the most elementary words.’ For a nominalist, Heidegger’s favourite words such as physis (Greek for ‘nature’) or Wesen (German for ‘essence’), are no more ‘elementary’ or ‘primordial’ than words such as ‘aubergine’ and ...”

“... than four times as many lobbyists as teachers ran for Parliament in July.The closer Labour got to power, the closer the business lobby got to Labour. The party conference in Liverpool last October was swarming with lobbyists. ‘This is my first Labour conference in years,’ a lobbyist for the energy industry told me at a sponsored drinks reception. ‘There ...”