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“... frustrations with the Civil Service and with the Treasury. Blair reveals that his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, overheard a phone conversation at the height of the crisis between the two Browns, during which Gordon warned Nick not to give in to Blair’s ‘presidential style’. It is a cliché of the Blair years, and not really true, that his was a ...”

“... a teenager called Amy in Amis Senior’s The Green Man, who is a fan of a pop-star called Jonathan Swift.Reading twenty-odd reviews of the same book was (for me) an unusual and unnerving experience. The dominant impression created by this bizarre over-exposure was of an aggregation of nervous tics so enormous that one had to think of them as cultural ...”

“... last of the great New York intellectuals associated with Partisan Review,’ the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in a memorial tribute, ‘she was the only one in that crowd who understood and appreciated film in a wholly cosmopolitan manner, as part of art and culture and thought.’ Partisan Review’s​ intellectuals and their English department ...”

“... your forehead starts to wrinkle? The only two that came unbidden to my mind are by Devo and Cat Power, who gave us wildly different takes on ‘Satisfaction’. (For the record, my own favourite Beatles covers are, in no particular order, by Caetano Veloso, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Harry Nilsson, Bobbie Gentry – and Marvin Gaye, who turns ...”

“... you could avoid reading him on a university campus, or continue reading him outside one. In Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Chip Lambert, a former associate professor of literature in his thirties, decides to purge his library of Marxist cultural critics in order to raise some funds with which to indulge the yuppie tastes of his new ...”

“... but there were other children in the block with whom I played in the spaces of the flats. Helen, Jonathan, Susan, whose doors I knocked on, with whom I would have tea sometimes, who, occasionally, would have tea with me in my flat. So, I still dream about getting back to roam in the corridors, to climb the fire escape, to play the games and tell myself the ...”

“... the Rounds: A Sort of Love Poem.’ In his interview with Hoy, Hecht considered the strange power of that poem ‘A Hill’. Hecht had discussed the poem with his therapist, he said, and went on: ‘You are perfectly right to see arid and defeated landscapes cropping up in a good number of my poems … They were for me a means to express a desolation of ...”

“... and was built on the site of the old thatched cathedral. It must have carried the great weight of power and newness which factories had in more industrial landscapes. It was where people first learned to remain quiet in large groups, and where they learned about being on time. Until the recent restoration I had never imagined the colour: people must have been ...”

“... parents had reservations when the couple got engaged in 1878: he had no notable ancestors, save Jonathan Edwards (who was only a distant relation); his means were modest and there was a family history of mental illness. Mabel, however, found it in herself to overlook all this. Her first requirement in a husband was sympathy to her ambitions. ‘No man can ...”

“... which, fifty years or more after it was written, burns on the page. Pathological and homosexual. Jonathan Arac, who edited Matthiessen’s letters, wrote that ‘to create the centrally authoritative critical identity of American Renaissance, much had to be displaced, or scattered, or disavowed.’ Matthiessen was aware of this. In January 1930 he wrote to ...”

“... Chu is visiting the guru who lives on the sweat of the young tennis-players; he notes that his power is in listening, in making you recognise that ‘He’s thinking as hard as you. It’s like he’s you in the top of a clean pond. It’s part of the attention.’ What Infinite Jest is creating is a future in which it exists. What it fears most is one in ...”

“... of her poetry and his antiquarianism, and at the same time to their own sense of privilege and power, which derived from the very oppressor of the ancient culture they admired. Their dual mandate, the ambiguity of their position, allowed them to be noticed and remembered, allowed them to do whatever they liked, and allowed Lady Wilde in 1879, three years ...”

“... was the one labelled “everyone is at risk.”’ An obvious fact was forever being obscured. As Jonathan Mann, the founder of the Word Health Organisation’s Global Programme on Aids, told a London audience in 1993, the spread of HIV is strongly determined by an identifiable societal risk factor … the scope, intensity and nature of discrimination which ...”