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“... 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 ...”

“... provided ‘matter to feed and fertilise the mind’. London sights could ‘feed me without a power of satiating me’. Of dreams, he said that ‘we love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies.’ He savoured experience, and so ...”

“... reason: he was the one with the camera. ‘Anyone could be in that suit,’ the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said of the picture of Aldrin. ‘It is a portrait of humanity evolving before our eyes into something new and extraordinary. It’s as if the moon’s surface has overwhelmed Aldrin’s face, or even become it.’ I’m not so sure: I see only ...”

“... like a fulfilment of prophecy, bringing closer the Second Advent and the overthrow of American power. To what extent the FBI negotiators were aware of this I do not know. Although Seventh-Day Adventist eschatology has a certain superficial similarity to that of Zoroastrianism, the deeper connections are indirect, mediated in the first instance by Paradise ...”

“... can’t be a legend, you have to be older.’ Thomson is not dealing in legend, though, but in the power of desire. Kidman isn’t just a star, or even a legend; she is a hegemon. How did she achieve the status she has now, at the top of the A-list of Hollywood actresses, and how has she kept it for so long? If you think Kidman doesn’t deserve a whole ...”

“... of mystic truth, is ultimately far more important and influential in shaping man’s fate than the power game of those with political aspirations who try to change the world directly.’ A highly debatable point of view, of course, and one with which Perutz, to judge by Is science necessary?, wouldn’t agree. While Delbrück’s non-technical writings mainly ...”

“... that she was considered exceptionally beautiful, and that her beauty endowed her with enormous power. As her paintings (in the style of the Decadents of the 1890s) began to be noticed in the annual salons, she also began to work on what Burke calls ‘the creation of a mannered self-image corresponding to the stylisation of her art’. Following in Oscar ...”

“... Thus conceived and completed, embodying ‘the fruit of conscientious industry combined with the power of vivid and coherent delineation’, the DNB was established as an abidingly useful and incomparably wide-ranging work of reference. But it also reflected the limitations of its age and the prejudices of its creators. Written at a time when there was no ...”

“... to an older Anglican or Catholic tradition of nature-writing. In Romantic Ecology (1991), Jonathan Bate made a useful case, more solid than Roe’s, for the adoption of Wordsworth along with Ruskin by, say the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, as the twin John the Baptists of respectable English conservationism. This line of thought is ...”

“... compacted, perfectly artful, little commentary on the absurdity of human perseverance and the power of accident. The duo’s terrible task with the piano seems to serve as a motif not just for their relationship but for their entire lives. They are hopeless, and when they finally get the piano into the house, well, of course, the owner says it’s come to ...”

“... steady diffusion outwards from its Parisian source. In the 1960s, Peter Gay gave them new power in his brilliant extended essay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Gay recognised the international dimensions of the Enlightenment, and included Scots, English, Germans and Italians as well as French in what he called the ‘little flock of ...”

“... monsters, animated cartoons and pictures about cute animals’. ‘How,’ asks the fiery Jonathan Lake Crane in Terror and Everyday Life (1994), ‘can lumbering dinosaurs spewing atomic fire … approach the fiery chaos that engulfed Japan?’ On the other hand, Japanese horror films staged a comeback during the 1990s, and Hollywood has been ...”

“... The first of them, The Wallcreeper (2014), was written in three weeks in order to make a point to Jonathan Franzen, who’d become a pen pal after being impressed by a letter she’d sent him out of the blue about the birds of the western Balkans. (Her point was that she could write a novel if she chose to, though she had the ancillary aim, she has said, of ...”

“... female acolyte, signalled by walks in Central Park, evenings at red sauce Italian restaurants, and Jonathan Schwartz and the Great American Songbook on the radio. When they meet, in 2002, Ezra is in his late sixties. Alice is 25, but everyone tells her she looks 16. Ezra dusts off his old Polaroid SX-70 and shoots her topless, the Chrysler Building shining ...”