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“... the long novel is an ocean with tides, capable of wearing down a thousand sharp edges. A book like Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones can safely include an episode after a few hundred pages that has nothing in common with what surrounds it. An old man, claiming to be over 120, comes to see the Nazi narrator, effectively offering himself up for extermination ...”

“... child. The concept of heredity also has a long history linked to the consolidation of wealth and power. In ancient Rome hereditas was a legal term that pointed to the state of being an heir – one to whom assets could be passed. In medieval Europe, powerful families began to put genealogies in writing to prove noble descent as well as their entitlement to ...”

“... that the vision is itself disseminated and dispersed. The weight of allusion is so great that Jonathan Culler remarks, in Structuralism and Since, that Dissemination is ‘Derrida’s most forbidding and difficult book’.If the reader is familiar with Derrida’s earlier work, though, there are enough cues in Dissemination to see what is going ...”

“... story rather than the other guy’s. And Quintilian also associates enargeia or evidentia with the power of an orator to arouse passions in his audience. When a narrative has evidentia, ‘emotions will ensue just as if we were present at the event itself.’ So the vivid probability of narrative ‘evidence’ can drive those jurors wild.And it can do so ...”

“... as somehow Irish, a clear marker of difference from the dreary materialism of the colonial power; although his victory doesn’t seem to have done much to soften the terrible end of Jonathan Swift, who died demented in 1745, unconsoled by his compatriot’s breakthrough in epistemology. Yeats saw Berkeley’s ...”

“... not least by the tabloids who asked for vengeance against the killers, and a mythological power grew around one particular image: James Bulger between the two boys, being led away. People were shocked by it, but they were also dazzled: they wanted to see deeper and deeper into the grain of the picture – and many spoke of wanting to reach right into ...”

“... seemingly narrow, individualistic concerns’ are in fact ways of ‘inscribing power relations’. Genealogy, she wants to claim, is political history in a formal sense. Its ‘methods and collections’ justified and reinforced African American disenfranchisement; suppressed interracial marriage involving whites; encouraged the practice ...”

“... 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 ...”