“... and dowdy woman who gobbled her food’, and seemingly reliable stories attest to the tyrannical power she exerted over Kipling. One has her interrupting his after-dinner conversations with ‘Rud, it is time you went to bed,’ which he obeyed meekly. Later she would threaten to throw herself out of the window if he didn’t do as she wanted. But one can ...”

“... even those that are called experimental. Usually in such books – in B.S. Johnson, say, or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) – the messing around with words is designed to be expressive: this page is split in half because the character is in two minds; this page is fragmented because the character cannot hear. The ...”

“... of crushing banality: ‘The 17th century was a most exciting time, with its shifts in political power, and with its rise and fall of kings, there was, predictably enough, a rise and fall in the fortunes of many of the subjects.’ Again: ‘While the emerging middle class was in general looking more to reading as a source of information, enlightenment and ...”

“... of meadow-bound bulls and the odd curveting heifer, with punchy but obscure straplines (‘Horton: power with dairyness’). The brochures were advertising bull semen. You filled in your picks and a few weeks later a vet would pitch up with a supercooled urn and a large syringe. Nowadays, human sex cells are big business too. The small-ads pages of US ...”

“... out a reason for all this connectedness. It says that the new mission is to ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’.Hmm. Alphabet’s mission statement, ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, came accompanied by the maxim ‘Don’t be evil,’ which has been the ...”

“... the first ‘computer musical instruments’ – or, in the case of hip-hop, dexterity and staying power with mixers and turntables. Cheaper units like the E-mu SP-1200, launched in 1987, made it relatively easy to create whole albums out of chopped-up clips from old records. Six seconds of drumming from ‘Amen, Brother’, a B-side released in 1969 by a funk ...”

“... socialists who had toppled them, and its cult of leadership struck a chord. When Hitler came to power in 1933, they were given the chance to play a role again. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski had been forced to run a taxi firm under the Weimar Republic; Ludolf von Alvensleben’s car firm, which he had set up after losing his Polish estate, went bankrupt; Karl ...”

“... of language, the validity of literature as an institution, the university as an instrument of power, the authority of a literary canon, male domination in English grammar, the alleged speciousness of logocentrism, or the several theories of hermeneutics. We knew, having read Bateson’s books, that he had political attitudes: he didn’t regard linguistic ...”

“... aged.’ Are they, are we, going to fester there, or shall we try to do something about it? ‘The power to resist adversity is a sweeping personal and collective issue’, Sennett writes. ‘Repair occurs in part by resisting economically induced withdrawal … The task is to stay engaged with others even if one feels rotten inside.’ For forty years now, in ...”

“... been Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, prophets of Cold War paranoia, rather than Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen, or all the chroniclers of the immigrant experience from Henry Roth to Jhumpa Lahiri. Pynchon and DeLillo have had oddly few successors, even though the end of the Cold War, with the apparent triumph of American-style capitalism, only accelerated ...”

“... the same time, their focus on the political implications of rape, on the one hand, and the sexual power of women, on the other, have a striking relevance to our own social and political history. Jonathan Crewe, in the recent, excellent Pelican Shakespeare Narrative Poems (1999), is particularly good on the sexual politics ...”

“... can be a form of domination, and being lavish with one’s own values can be a cover for taking power. ‘As nature, inexorable, onward, resistless, impassive amid the threats and screams of disputants, so America,’ Whitman wrote to Emerson. ‘Let all defer.’ By starting in Whitman’s era, and ending in the distant future, Cunningham has made his ...”

“... of empire were still being fashioned in Ireland. In the early and worst period of British power in Bengal Scots had a disproportionately large share; ‘Scots rapacity’ and penury made them perhaps more willing than Englishmen to risk premature death. One Scotsman’s effects, listed at Calcutta, included the works of Shakespeare, Milton and ...”

“... Thiel’s firm Mithril Capital. In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (2021), Max Chafkin argues that Thiel treats ‘life like a chess game’ with ‘his friends, his business partners and his portfolio companies as means to an end’. His political philosophy is complicated and not entirely coherent – but, in the ...”

“... see the folks who disapproved of her. It all gets a little desultory after that, partly because Jonathan Pryce has decided to play Perón as just a nice chap – a little reserved and distant, but certainly a gentleman compared with all of Evita’s other fellers. You also start thinking about the limits of the genre the movie belongs to: the pop ...”