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“... of the story of La Pia) is always an error; that updating Dante’s circumstance (as Leigh Hunt does in what Griffiths refers to as his ‘Disneyfication’ of Francesca da Rimini) becomes parodic; and many other such trouvailles. It is fun (at least for anyone interested in Dante and in verse form) to see how the poet has been ‘channelled’ (as ...”

“... stepping fastidiously round the garden expecting to be fed. 16 July. A book review in the LRB by Jonathan Coe of The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson edited by Harry Mount kicks off with some remarks about the so-called satire boom of the early 1960s. It recalls John Bird’s The Last Laugh, the Cambridge Footlights revue of 1959 (which I saw) and while ...”

“... are much more suspicious of ‘high culture’. In his introduction to Political Shakespeare, Jonathan Dollimore analyses a tripartite pattern in ideological conflicts of consolidation, subversion and containment. In certain circumstances, drama may subvert the ruling ideology, but the probability is that these challenges will eventually serve to ...”

“... legal bills were footed by News International (now called News UK). Brooks was represented by Jonathan Laidlaw, a reedy-voiced, courteous attack dog, on £6000 a day. Coulson had Timothy Langdale, the plummy doyen of the Bar, at a cost of £7000 a day. Andrew Edis, whose crisp, untheatrical delivery made you feel he was telling the truth, acted for the ...”

“... possessing People with an ill Opinion of the Government, no Government cou’d subsist’. The hunt for the perpetrators (juiced by rewards of £200 for the author and £50 for the printer) began as soon as the Memorial hit the streets in July 1705. But when proceedings reached the Old Bailey in late August, its authorship was still an unsolved mystery and ...”

“... could turn these anti-semitic notions to their own ends, the tactic was not without risk. In 1988, Jonathan Frankel wrote in an article in Contemporary Jewry that ‘the belief in Jewish power, exaggerated to the level of myth, had permitted Jewish organisations and advocates to intervene at crucial moments and at the highest government levels . . . Few ...”

“... are much like ourselves, only better-looking, with faster cars; people like Tom Hanks or Helen Hunt derive the major part of their appeal from what we might call their apparent ordinariness, and only occasionally, as with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, does an actor come along who seems to have the superhuman plasticity of a cartoon. These movie ...”

“... academics and their MFA spawn, Dickensian verisimilitude courtesy of Wikipedia (cf Rachel Kushner, Jonathan Safran Foer et al). Something of this retrograde motion warps American criticism as well. Even today, when subjects Burroughs treated long before anyone else – the surveillance state, the technological engineering of consciousness, planetary extinction ...”

“... Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyse and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans. The only difference is that the NSA does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money. The corporations doing this are not the counterculture, or the ...”

“... John Patten . . . so ambitious that he squeaks when he walks’, ‘that lazy, greasy slob John Hunt’, ‘that toad John Major . . . who has always loathed me’ and so on. Only the blessed Thatcher seems properly fanatical, and thus begin Clark’s twenty-something years of unrequited worship. (‘Goodness, she is beautiful,’ he sighs from time to ...”

“... and, in the playwright’s name, deploy a considered programme of anti-Jacobin propaganda. As Jonathan Bate has pointed out in an incisive study of the cultural politics of the period,* Hazlitt stands as the Radical to Coleridge’s Conservative in terms of a struggle for possession of Shakespeare that was a feature of British ideology between Waterloo ...”

“... clearly his bonhomie disguised an Iago. When that identification proved too absurd, the hunt shifted to economists, to Gramsci’s friend Piero Sraffa or – a masterstroke of ingenuity – to another Kingsman, the pre-1914 welfare economist A.C. Pigou, whose lack of interest in ideology and keen interest in young mountaineers was supposedly ...”

“... in modern fiction. In other respects, the novel is a disappointing performance. Jonathan Cape would apparently have us take Alice fell as a condition-of-England novel. Yet this national portentousness is refracted at the reader by fictional techniques which are distractingly mal à propos. Superficially, Alice fell is, in fact, scarcely a ...”

“... the squatters most of what they wanted did not ‘deprive the natives of their former right to hunt over these Districts, or to wander over them in search of subsistence, in the manner to which they have been heretofore accustomed’. The new Governor failed to comply. Only the pious George Gawler, Governor of South Australia, implemented these ...”

“... remembering’, ‘a conflation of the period recalled with the process of recalling it’. Jonathan Lethem, in his very sharp introduction to a Modern Library reprint of The Man Who Was Thursday, says the novel is ‘far too personal and strange to parse as an allegory of Chesterton’s Catholicism’, and he is right. Or rather, it is too personal and ...”