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“... and Wilson describe relevance generally, and yet precisely enough for it to have great explanatory power. It seems to me that everyday communication may, in fact, be achieved by such optimally relevant selection. It is a flaw in their exposition, however, that they do not dispose of alternatives to the ‘easiest path’ hypothesis. Their case would have been ...”

“... the European Union we know today – but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars.’ The impact of the Second World War on Britain is likewise appraised by Ferguson, this time in collaboration with Andrew Roberts, posing the question: what if Hitler had invaded in 1940? With national survival ...”

“... had the efficiency or reach to rely entirely on this – but there were other methods for wielding power over authors and printers, suppressing particular works and constraining public discourse in general. As Cyndia Susan Clegg writes in her studies of press control under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, censorship had always functioned via a range of ...”

“... references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic ...”

“... venerated alongside Alexander Pope, who held that ‘Most Women have no Characters at all,’ or Jonathan Swift, who, at the conclusion of that catalogue of excremental horrors ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, has his speaker remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?’ Or even Samuel Johnson. If women’s writing ...”

“... grabbed Foote’s pistol and locked it in his desk. Less fortunate was the Democratic congressman Jonathan Cilley of Maine, killed in a duel by his colleague William Graves of Kentucky in 1838. As Freeman relates, this confrontation, which no one really wanted to take place, originated with some innocuous comments on the House floor about corruption in the ...”

“... the stipulation that part of our Empire is to be allotted to the economic Influence of a given Power.’ Britain and Italy had to withdraw in some confusion. In 1928 Italy and Ethiopia signed a twenty-year Treaty of Friendship, under whose terms Italy undoubtedly expected to take the lead in supplying the aid without which Tafari could not modernise his ...”

“... the institutional status quo. If ‘truth’, as Foucault argues, is a reflex function of the power to impose such a dominant discourse, then it is the concept of truth which itself needs dismantling, and along with it the old opposition between ‘science’ and ‘ideology’. It is therefore not a question, Eagleton now argues, of devising some new and ...”

“... Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since Martin’s, Bate’s should finally disprove Dickens’s dismissal of it as a ‘preposterous exaggeration ...”

“... material into his great work, he made no mention of them in the Origin of Species. Such is the power of the myth, however, that it is widely assumed that Origin relies heavily on evidence from the birds. Despite the shortcomings of his analysis, the finches have subsequently become a paradigmatic case of evolution in action, now serving as the centrepiece ...”

“... a chapter on Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ she borrows an idea from her then husband Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics: that the ‘orientational features of language which refer to the situation of utterance’ – words like ‘I’ and ‘now’ – are a ‘purely relational linguistic fiction with no referent in the external ...”

“... future forms’. Moreover, ‘each thought of a poet contains enormous potential force, like the power confined in a piece of coal or in a living cell, but infinitely more subtle, imponder able and potent’. Emotion is an organ of knowledge, and humanity, as it is being purified in the fire of love, is evolving into something higher than itself. All of ...”

“... Because the military profession was reserved to Mamluks, some of them rose to positions of great power and transcended their original ‘slave’ status, and a Mamluk elite eventually emerged. In 1250 it seized power in Egypt and Syria and established the Mamluk Sultanate, with its capital in Cairo. Later the Ottomans ...”

“... elected leader that sustains Yeltsin, however, so much as his hold on the massively centralised power of the Russian state, which in its organisation has changed very little since Soviet times. There are no strong independent civic institutions, and the Army, Interior Ministry and intelligence services are still obedient to the President, while he has ...”

“... to the mythical Brain of Einstein. Theory lays claim to a massively generalised explanatory power, as it does when Jakobson advances his famous definition of poetic language as that which ‘projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination’. In each case there is a kind of linguistic a priori which enables ...”