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“... long road to nation-building. Kazakhstan was the last of the 15 republics to declare independence. Jonathan Aitken is an unlikely candidate to write a book on this subject. Since emerging from prison after his conviction for perjury in 1999 he has written books about himself and other public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special ...”

“... and self-deception. Adrian Oldfield’s eloquent evocation of the civic republican tradition and Jonathan Boswell’s path-breaking analysis of the links between the values of community and the imperatives of an advanced economy should be read against this background. They exemplify the same tentative but unmistakable new paradigm. Both are what Boswell ...”

“... that Mao inherited was poor and economically devastated. Its situation compared to the major powers was arguably worse than it had been when the Europeans made their scramble for China a hundred years earlier. Mao knew this and had no intention of repeating the errors of Qianlong – this was no time for false pride. Beijing aligned itself closely with ...”

“... life.’ The eventual irony is that her investigation decides nothing and is actually thwarted by powers outside her control: the supposed agent of organisation and authority, sent to expose the Catchprices’ flailing hopelessness, turns out to be equally at the mercy of circumstance. We get an early hint of this when Maria finds herself attracted to Jack ...”

“... the great principles of liberalism were localism and legislative reform. To begin with, extending powers to elected local bodies strengthened the authority of local gentlemen in many parts of the country – intentionally. But, in an urbanising society, it inevitably led to the devolution of most power to the commercial, professional and shopkeeping ...”

“... his compatriots to ‘liquidate the German problem’. The Potsdam Agreement between the Allied powers in July 1945 said that the transfer of Germans should be ‘humane and orderly’, but much of it was callously carried out.The misery of the expelled Germans did not end when they reached the two embryonic postwar German states, the Western occupation ...”

“... caution. Although Tunisia is not a front-line state in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, outside powers are watching it closely: ‘If Nahda becomes the main force that controls the political game, this could add new problems rather than solve old ones. Tunisia cannot afford any extra pressure on people’s lifelines, given our fragile economy, weak trading ...”

“... has for a long time been the view of a neoliberal school of legal thought; but the argument of Jonathan Sumption’s 2019 Reith Lectures, delivered in May and June and now issued in book form, is more accommodating. It is that while law and due process have their place, they owe considerably more respect to the political process than the UK’s courts have ...”

“... Change and Liberation – but then he served on the committee that drafted it. Many criticise the powers the new constitution gives the president – MPs won’t have the right to hold a vote of no confidence in any government he appoints – but Jamil points to such successes as the removal of the Baath Party’s monopoly of power: new political parties will ...”

“... Putin is very touchy about sovereignty. He suspects that the United States and the major European powers want to undermine Russia and even provoke it into falling apart. Although he accepts the expansion of Nato as an accomplished fact, he sees it as essentially anti-Russian. Any suggestion of a major European role in finding a Chechen solution would be ...”

“... in a style that could be characterised as High Hipster – two parts Lord Buckley, one part Austin Powers. Stan Lee was a writer gone Barnum, who’d abandoned new work in favour of rah-rah moguldom. He was Marvel’s media liaison and their own biggest in-house fan, a schmoozer. Imagine if Orson Welles had never bothered to direct films again after The Lady ...”

“... curiosities as Renaissance cross-dressing and the like. Among his colleagues on the board are Jonathan Goldberg, author, among other adventurous works, of Sodometrics: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, Marjorie Garber, a celebrated, good-humoured and energetic advocate of bisexuality, and Jonathan Dollimore, an ...”

“... his astringent dissection of self-serving internationalist hypocrisy is more valuable than ever. Jonathan Haslam’s perceptive and intelligent biography shows how much Carr’s thinking was shaped by the age into which he was born, even if he seemed on the surface to have broken utterly with his origins. ‘For all the dramatic changes that were to occur ...”

“... quite believe. Pieces of plot float in from nowhere, supernatural characters develop new sets of powers in mid-scene, all the most soppy and obvious scenes are played as if they were Ibsen and all the jokes have been replaced by weary memories of what the movies used to be like – what the two previous Spider-Man movies were like, I mean. American critics ...”

“... the tide can be turned before things get out of hand. The Economic Legacy 1979-1992, edited by Jonathan Michie, contains a set of essays by over thirty leading economists which analyse the results of the great market experiment in a large number of individual fields. They tell a sorry tale of failure and polarisation. To take only a few examples. Professor ...”