“... to share generic features with its more popular cousins, but it doesn’t; Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are not of the same genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’. Indeed, the solution may actually be a rather simple one, namely that modernism is not a genre, while SF emphatically is – and this opens up ...”

“... every week. Religious revivals prove temporary. The people of Florence soon wearied of Savonarola. Jonathan Edwards, preaching God’s wrath in the 1730s in my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, brought his congregation to paroxysms of weeping, despair and repentance, but after the ‘great awakening’ had spread through the region and made him ...”

“... at the enemies of the Party on the telescreen. Would Orwell have secretly been delighted by the post-Orwellian sadism of Big Brother the TV series? He certainly understood how groupthink could fuse with sadistic appetites to generate entertainment. But although the Two Minutes Hate in the bath is the kind of thing most people do (or so I want to ...”

“... German strategy, was Harry Hinsley. After the war, Hinsley returned to Cambridge as a don. Post-war Cambridge was dominated in the humanities, not so much by Leavis, as by Butterfield and Oakeshott, who had founded the Cambridge Journal. Through his famous criticism of rationalism in politics, Oakeshott there questioned the assumptions, motives and ...”

“... as Roark (Rand was delighted: Cooper was famously right-wing) and Patricia Neal as Dominique. Jonathan Romney, reviewing a 1998 re-release, admired the ‘monumentalist oppressiveness’ of the art direction, then remarked on how strange it was to see the noble Gary Cooper professing not the usual love-of-the-little-fellow tosh, but the joys of the ...”

“... writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,’ does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of 19th-century France into 21st-century American English? Davis’s stories, typically from ...”

“... nourishment for writers who seek it out, make it their own, and use it to create something new.Jonathan Bate’s​ How the Classics Made Shakespeare has more modest goals. Bate grants that Shakespeare’s classical influences have often been studied before, but claims that ‘certain aspects of Shakespeare’s classical inheritance have been curiously ...”

“... International Review, who like her supposed fictional avatar had been dismissed from a teaching post because of her German heritage (Kilman is an anglicised version of Kiehlman). But there is, I think, another candidate, one who arrived on the scene at precisely the moment when Woolf was beginning to think that ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, in which ...”

“... died. British Generals in Blair’s Wars kicks off with a vigorous attack on Tony Blair by Jonathan Bailey, who retired from the army as head of doctrine in 2005.2 But towards the end of the book, as the commanders who served in Afghanistan get their say, the dominant tone is of anger towards the Ministry of Defence and the army itself, which emerges ...”

“... detail, the progress of his fatal illness, and then playing the part of the coroner to offer us a post-mortem. Where modern biography is typically reticent about death, Inglis wallows in it, describing Raymond’s physical collapse as though vicariously enjoying the man’s final loss of his virility. At a quarter to nine, pain hit him like a punch. In the ...”

“... Book decision even to do this, like walking on a tightrope not between skyscrapers but between the post office and the grocery store. Karl Ove gives us permission to step sideways from our own lives, become larger. I saw Elvis at his desk, writing.When people dislike Knausgaard’s books, there is often a sense of personal insult, as if they were watching him ...”

“... born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916, the eighth of eleven children. Her siblings became teachers, post-office clerks, beauticians, farmers, but Hardwick had larger aspirations. ‘How can you be from here and think like you do?’ a fellow Southerner asked. The Kentucky of thoroughbreds and tobacco was not for her: ‘I would have gone to the ends of the ...”

“... unable to persuade the tsar that it was a natural revolt against Ottoman misrule, gave up his post and retired to his sister’s estates near Odessa. There he drafted an appeal for European intervention against repression in Greece, which the provisional government in Nafplio sought in vain to present to the Congress of Verona in 1822, the last of the ...”

“... commodities broker who said recently at the Euromoney Global Borrowers and Investors Forum: ‘If, post-EU … we come up with a regulatory framework which is cheaper and more competitive, but retains the confidence of the customers, we can actually make London a more competitive marketplace for foreign banks from all over the world.’ The ex-broker was Nigel ...”

“... the Dutch European commissioner and his personal assistant.The commissioner with whom he landed a post was Frits Bolkestein. In the Dutch political landscape Bolkestein cut an unusual figure. Son of a president of the court of Amsterdam, after a polymathic education – degrees successively in mathematics, philosophy, Greek, economics (at the LSE) and law ...”