“... 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 ...”

“... in two forms around the Peace of Utrecht: on the one hand, in the new conception of a balance of power – a phrase inscribed for the first time in the treaty – between the rival realms of Europe, an idea developed in England by Charles Davenant and Jonathan Swift; on the other, in the ideal of a federation of states to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... about what it used to be like to stay at the Ritz.A fashion magazine at the height of its power was measured by its weight. American Vogue’s September 2012 issue, its fattest ever, was 916 pages and weighed a beefy five pounds. The heft came from the many pages purchased and filled by glamorous advertisers – Chanel, Dior, Vuitton, Gucci, Bottega ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as ‘the Ambassadors’ Plot’ or ‘the Lockhart Plot’. Reilly is a secondary character in Jonathan Schneer’s The Lockhart Plot; Neal Ascherson, reviewing the book in the LRB (5 November 2020), describes him as an ‘ungraspable rogue’. Schneer gives a detailed account of the plot and its failure. In brief, it turned on subverting the regiments of ...”

“... the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key ...”

“... ultimately unbearable face of the anarchistic powers of capital’. The Nazis were legally in power, and Goebbels didn’t want people to see a film about toppling governments, or toppling the very idea of government.I need to explain why I (and others) think the film is anti-authoritarian, or authoritarian in an unorthodox way. First, let’s consider ...”