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“... Although popular dissatisfaction is growing, economic analysts in Minsk point out that, unlike the post-Soviet leaders of Russia and Ukraine, he ‘hasn’t let business capture the economy’. He keeps business leaders in a subordinate position and ‘sets a threshold for looting by the elite’, while also defending them against predatory Russian ...”

“... was still in his mid-twenties at the time. He had lived in Paris since 1930, obtaining a teaching post at the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and finding a congenial welcome at the heart of the French philosophical establishment, especially from the Christian philosopher-playwright Gabriel Marcel, and the Jewish metaphysician and poet Jean Wahl. They all ...”

“... militant, Calogero Schiro, has at dawn on 18 April 1948, the day of the Communists’ greatest post-war electoral defeat. Calogero was dreaming that he was signing ballot papers as village representative of the PCI when suddenly a heavy arm in a military tunic fell on the pile of ballots. He looked up and saw Stalin. Calogero’s first thought ...”

“... did to pass the time, what they thought about Italian opera, why they were so fascinated with Jonathan Wild, what exactly went wrong in the South Sea Bubble, and why Swift’s Laputa has more to do with money-making gadgetry than with the Royal Society and its proceedings. Rogers’s trust in facts is such that he often appears content to be what Kenner ...”

“... but rarely glance sideways at the historical context of their own attraction to desire. Jonathan Dollimore’s Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture manages to pack no less than three resonant negations into its title, an emphasis on depletion at odds with the ambitiousness of his project. In a remarkably wide-ranging survey from Anaximander to ...”

“... oughtn’t they to be prepared to take it either way? I know that’s easy to say, and I remember Jonathan Miller once telling me, and convincingly so, that nobody to whom it hasn’t happened can know how peculiarly disagreeable it is to be lampooned in print. But as Goethe said, and I quoted to the famous Jonathan on ...”

“... is fast, brutal, ruthless and efficient. Anybody who has ever tried to buy a stamp in an Italian post office will know that the Italian state, though it may sometimes be brutal, is neither fast nor efficient. The only encouraging sign is that there are so many perfectly ordinary people who go on fighting. I sat in a car next to the widow of a Palermo ...”

“... ministers Lord John Russell and Gladstone. Tyndall was never tempted to take up a professional post outside London, partly because he was unfamiliar with university teaching and research – some academic physicists like James Clerk Maxwell disparaged his lack of higher mathematics – but mainly because he wanted access to the London social world, with ...”

“... constant repetition of tabloid-style slogans. Leaders convinced themselves that in the prosperous post-industrial West, politics could safely be reduced to the art of winning elections by targeting the swing voter’s preferences. The politician had lots to learn from marketing companies, because the voters who mattered inhabited a consumer society, so there ...”

“... in the last twenty years but also for British politics more widely, describes himself as a ‘post-liberal’. By this he appears to mean that he has a less market-oriented economic policy, and ‘greater respect for “flag, faith and family” social conservatism’. Attitudes to immigration are central to both: Goodhart’s social conservatism seems to ...”

“... a watchtower on the Bagram airfield, a mile from the Taliban lines. Ever the hunter, her idea of post-coital amusement is to lark with the Northern Alliance mujahidin who’ve been guarding the love nest and are dickering about with an ancient Soviet tank. While Kellas in the watchtower puts in a phone call to his mother in Scotland, Astrid goads the ...”

“... observers were under the same illusion. They were overlooking the fact that in its immediate post-Ceausescu period Romania was not an attractive model. And having just won independence from Moscow, Moldovans did not want to cede it to Bucharest. Besides, most of the three-quarters of Moldova’s population of 4.3 million who speak Romanian preferred to ...”

“... on the newly opened Soviet archives, We Now Know, the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis took a post-revisionist approach. He argued that Cold War studies should focus on the battle of ideas, and not just on military power, since the Soviet Union fell not as a result of military defeat or an economic crash but because of a collapse in legitimacy. While ...”

“... or sample demonstrations of theoretical routines cried up as novelties. The series edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield under the title ‘Cultural Polities’ has some twenty volumes in store already, covering popular fiction and music as well as canonical literature. Of these, the first four published titles present a mixed impression in ...”

“... the dots into a coherent picture requires a broad brush and some pretty bold splashes of paint. Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric aims to show that Wellek was wrong, and that it is possible to make transhistorical claims about lyric. Culler is a veteran of the theory wars of the 1970s and 1980s, when he wrote what remain the clearest sympathetic ...”