“... 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 ...”

“... excitement). In a career whose contours provide another of Brewer’s telling case-studies, Jonathan Tyers, proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens, made it a place of music and art, as well as parade and flirtation. Those who paid their shilling might be serenaded not only by love songs and patriotic airs, but also by the music of Corelli, J.C. Bach and ...”

“... of the new entente – the last, with its perception of the links between political and cultural power, reminding one of Tony Harrison. There is something, too, of Harrison’s angle on the familiar in Dunn’s arresting four-line poem, ‘Glasgow Schoolboys, Running Backwards’. The ‘Ballad of the Two Left Hands’, on the unemployed, and a fine elegy ...”

“... would be considered a sign of sickness, but for the moment it demonstrated ‘with singular power that a madman was not sick’. There is also a contrasting register – more conspicuous in this new translation – in which Foucault introduces numerous qualifications into his picture of classical unreason. Alongside the correctional institutions in ...”

“... when they see it – unless they’re as dim as the Irish bishop who is supposed to have said of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels that ‘for his part he hardly believed a word of it’ (‘hardly’ is a deliciously bishoply way of hedging his bets). Satire is a slippery beast because it’s often treated as a ‘mode’ of writing rather than a ...”

“... also noted that ‘this objective is not formally stated in public documents.’) In May 2003, Jonathan Eyal, now associate director at RUSI, complained that ‘persuading international public opinion that a military action against Iraq was necessary should have been easy.’ But for some reason, even within the Anglosphere large numbers of people were ...”

“... vile conditions, but for supermarket meat it is the norm by a colossal margin. In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer noted that there wasn’t enough ‘non-factory chicken produced in America to feed the population of Staten Island’. Farmageddon states that ‘99 per cent of broiler chickens in America’ are reared in the worst kind of processing ...”

“... That is only an expression. I do not have a literary life different from any other life.’ Jonathan Franzen did his part in 2010, with a rapturous essay in the New York Times about the same book. ‘I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people in this country who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to ...”

“... ostensibly for his own satisfaction, or perhaps ‘to kill time before it finally kills you’. Jonathan Littell, an American educated in France, wrote The Kindly Ones in French. It won the Prix Goncourt and sold a million copies in Europe. The reception in Anglophone countries but especially in Germany has been much more critical. Yet from the first pages ...”

“... by it. I did a long interview with him in 1995, when he was completing a gentle descent from power by serving as chairman of the main TV channel. I’d asked him about his time as Ideology Secretary when, as Alexander Tsipko recounts in his 1992 book, Is Stalinism Really Dead?, he would sit in the vast office occupied for so long by the Stalinist Mikhail ...”