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“... eight. At the weekends, when you see them with the children, they go to heroic lengths – as Jonathan Coe points out in The Closed Circle – to occupy themselves doing exactly the same things they would be doing if the children weren’t there: reading papers, sending emails, talking on the phone. When the children are small the wives occupy themselves ...”

“... Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings. Britain and France were both to play a part. On 29 August, the day Parliament voted against ...”

“... When Beaumont died in 2016, the Sark Newspaper’s front page referred to his ‘abuse of power, his abuses of human rights and crimes against humanity – all of which has been unseen in the Western world since the days of Nazi Germany’. (That same week his son received a letter from David offering to buy the seigneurship. He didn’t offer his ...”

“... How a Continent Became a Union, which catapulted van Middelaar to fame and the precincts of power, is a remarkable work. The tones in which it was received are of another order. ‘There are books,’ a Belgian reviewer declared, ‘before which a chronicler is reduced to a single form of commentary: an advertisement.’ The author himself has posted ...”

“... he leaves the accusation to hang in the air, a nasty suspicion which it is apparently beyond his power, as a biographer, to exorcise, ‘I don’t know; the lectures were so very well known ... And the closeness of treatment is certainly striking ... Williams wrote damn fast and always used his authorities swiftly and silently; he acknowledged rarely; he ...”

“... troubling when Hardwick is writing about real people. For Plath, ‘suicide is an assertion of power, of the strength – not the weakness – of the personality. She is no poor animal sneaking away, giving up; instead she is strong, threatening, dangerous.’ Nor is Hardwick afraid to pit Plath’s suicide against that of another female writer: ‘When ...”

“... Arrow. The gimmick of the earlier book, telling a life story in strict reverse order, had a huge power which included the power to numb. House of Meetings doesn’t have a gimmick, and any historical-revisionist agenda is swallowed up in the task of writing something analogous to the novel about the Soviet era that Nabokov ...”

“... It was not a mistake. ‘We knew what we were hitting. It was well-planned,’ said Admiral Jonathan Howe, the American officer in charge of the UN operation. One of Howe’s legal advisers immediately questioned whether the attack had breached the Geneva Conventions. Almost certainly, it had. Unlike the Belgians and Canadians, the US has held no public ...”

“... Barry Lyndon (1975), an adaptation of Thackeray’s not exactly famous novel. Its craftmanship and power aren’t enough to rescue it from a lingering feeling of gratuitousness. Why this resurrection of an 18th-century battle now? Unlike the Second World War, we cannot say that it is an abiding subject of interest. A passionate denunciation of war in ...”

“... to place such advertisements on, or in the immediate vicinity of, a phone booth. According to Jonathan Glancey, in London: Bread and Circuses (2001), what’s wrong with the new deregulated metropolis is too much instant availability: ‘Unprotected sex with Eastern Europeans on the make for a few quid just a piss-streaked telephone kiosk’s call ...”

“... manufacturing cost and lifetime performance is equally important. The workload of, say, a domestic power-drill can be almost inconceivably light; its whole lifetime in use is measured in hours. Domestic washing-machines and cars, both lighter and much more reliable than they used to be, are not as solid as industrial versions – laundromat machines and buses ...”

“... entrance. Everyone on the train looked terribly prosperous, clean and peaceful as they read about Jonathan King and the Nias earthquake in the Standard. It is amazing to watch the skill with which three people can stand in a rocking train, in a space less than two metres square, without touching each other, and read their papers without falling over. At Baker ...”

“... her by marrying in 1916, Cather remained enthralled by – yet deeply conflicted over – the power of the feminine. While longing all her life for some primal ‘maternal-erotic’ figure to whom to cleave, she also despised her own yearnings, and sought to identify herself, self-protectively, with boys and men. Much of the strange reticence of her ...”

“... Brown was another story). The members of Budd’s commission included the political philosopher Jonathan Wolff and the sports journalist Mihir Bose. The report they produced in 2001, for the newly created Department for Culture, Media and Sport, was intelligent and elegantly written, but unlike the Rothschild report, it was also pretty forthright. It turned ...”

“... Jew, and as one who knows more than most about wartime anti-semitism. He admires the intellectual power of de Man’s late work: ‘the only peculiar thing is that a philosophical mind of this calibre should turn against the pretensions of philosophy and toward literature.’ And now he wonders about the purity of these deconstructive essays. ‘Hegel or ...”