“... death to her life. In the novel, the cold fury climaxes in a lengthy denunciation of the will-to-power manifest in the Harley Street specialist Sir William Bradshaw’s worship of the twin ‘goddesses’ of ‘Proportion’ – in effect, compliance with the status quo – and ‘Conversion’, a desire to subdue and control. As Hussey points out, this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... housing, are another thing. They are low and loud, blades set to maximum volume. An assertion of power. A jolt of paranoia. They have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, and used it to launch an attack on this whole new breed of overweening literary theorists. From this point of view, deconstruction is merely the belated revenge of those disreputable sophists and perverters of reason whom ...”