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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... transatlantic wind of the kind McCarthy unleashed in Washington to blow through the corridors of power? Had it not been for this conspiracy against honest journalists, the head of MI5, Hollis himself, would have been unmasked and the Establishment would have crumbled. Nevertheless the sleuths have had their triumphs. Chapman Pincher is certainly one of the ...”

“... Cardoen, at the request of the Israelis, in a deal negotiated while Pinochet was still in power. Cardoen, it is believed, was of great interest to the British journalist, Jonathan Moyle, at the time of his death in Santiago last March. The company supplied Iraq during the war with Iran and was rumoured last year to ...”

“... valley and also carried on a rich maritime trade from the South China coast, represented a naval power such as the Mongols had never encountered before. They decided first of all to outflank it, driving south through the rugged terrain of West China-terrain so difficult that when Mao made his Long March through it in the opposite direction, escaping from the ...”

“... Similar doubts apply to Goldhagen’s treatment of the popular mood after Hitler came to power. One of the Nazis’ first acts was to suspend civil liberties in general, not just those of Jews. Most of the inmates of the first concentration camp, Dachau, were political opponents rather than racial victims. Public protests were few, whoever the ...”

“... of capital investment, commercialisation, and the exercise of political, military and ideological power by predatory elites and their associates.’ Periods of lessened inequality, Scheidel aims to show, have rarely, if ever, been the result of a simple improvement in the income of the poorest sectors of a population. Instead, they have been the result of a ...”

“... a kind of celebrity in this period that they probably could not have attained before or after. As Jonathan Rose has observed about the explosion of print towards the close of the 19th century: ‘Lord Salisbury’s oft-quoted sneer – “Written by office boys for office boys” – accurately summed up a revolutionary social fact: journalism had opened an ...”

“... got American technology, which was increasingly becoming more important to sigint than mere mental power, and which did require great material resources – mostly to build and launch orbital satellites. (Britain’s attempt to compete with the US here, the Zircon project, collapsed in 1987.) But the alliance came at a price. Britain’s foreign policy was ...”

“... newspapers in 1800, as if to provide a pleasant distraction from Napoleon’s centralisation of power, and then spread throughout Europe, taking on, according to Kraus, each language’s, and country’s, worst attributes. In Germany it became pedantic and moralising; in Austria-Hungary melodramatically moody and snobbishly refined. Kraus compared the ...”

“... face’. He was amazed that this brilliant man, who had seen ‘so many people defeated by age, power and success and written so convincingly about them should have fallen into the trap set by life’. In Julian Evans’s depiction of the Havana scene in Semi-Invisible Man, we begin to understand the force of Hemingway’s decline and its effect on ...”

“... were flooding into Zimbabwe and would be harshly dealt with. The Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, went on TV to say that such people had better be prepared to spend a very long time in Zimbabwe and we knew what he meant. Mr Moyo had several times made it clear that he regards me with particular loathing so I wasn’t too surprised to find ...”

“... artistic spirit; but not all artists have viewed their trade in this high-minded manner. Jonathan Swift or Samuel Johnson would have been dismayed by this grandiose inflation of their literary hackwork. And who knows how Aeschylus or the author of Beowulf regarded their craft? It would be rash to assume that they thought of it in the same way Shelley ...”