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“... nationalist (hence the pre-eminence, as cited sources, of Shakespeare, laureate of England, and Scott, laureate of the Union), and chauvinistically masculine. Jesperson’s luckless observation that ‘the English language seems positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it’ is ...”

“... by authors who save their best efforts for quite different sorts of writing. They may, as Jonathan Raban’s title suggests, be working for love as well as money, and it is easy to understand their wish to give their best work in this kind a more permanent form. Raban has some engaging remarks on this subject. As he says, very few people can now make ...”

“... an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it?’ Jonathan Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, is an object lesson in the management of such obscenity. The book begins with a loss. After lengthy treatment for colon cancer, his widowed mother, Irene, has died. The youngest of three brothers who’ve ...”

“... will be a lower Gini coefficient, improving the country’s standing in the league tables. Had Jonathan Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ for dealing with the excess population of Ireland been realised it would have greatly improved Ireland’s Gini coefficient. What might we want to know that Scheidel’s analysis can’t tell us? For one thing, it seems ...”

“... in Margaret Rose’s unambitious but informative summary of the literature on post-modernism. Jonathan Friedman, in Modernity and Identity, allows that the reassertion of traditional religious values may be one of a number of cultural strategies adopted as modernism declines; but, in general, the existence of fundamentalism does not impinge on ...”

“... at least the middle of the 20th century. Can there be a proper history of working-class reading? Jonathan Rose believes that there can be, and after five hundred pages, 24 tables and more than 1600 footnotes it’s clear he has a point. His introduction (still more the publisher’s blurb) makes much of the book’s ‘innovative research techniques’, the ...”

“... urbane Old Etonian leader of the Liberal Party, had been accused of conspiring to murder Norman Scott, a former male model and Thorpe’s sometime lover, who had become a danger to his reputation and career. In the event the only victim was Scott’s great Dane, Rinka, shot dead on Exmoor by a hired hitman (a former ...”

“... in the town: a gloomy Puritan history lingers, a trace, perhaps, of the ferocious Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards. There is also the eerie emptiness of nature in New England, the dark, wooded landscape that seems hollow, and menacing, without a history. Even the streets of Stockbridge seem empty. No one is around. They are, no doubt, in their cars, and ...”

“... acting deliberately against the interests and wishes of his British imperial superiors, even – Scott Anderson suggests – to the point of treason. (When George V tried to decorate him after the war, he handed all the medals back on the spot.) He was also very much against European cultural imperialism, genuinely – so far as we can tell – preferring ...”

“... half a millennium later provided the matter for the great novel of English ethnogenesis, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819). It took a 19th-century Scot to contemplate 12th-century England; and Scott himself was probably using the Saxon-Norman encounter as a device for exploring Anglo-Scottish acculturation since the Union ...”

“... and seamless plastic, and go lengths to prove things we don’t need or even want proven. As A.O. Scott has written, the impulse to knit together improbable, breakneck, still-photographic comic book panels into a flow of smoothly animated movement is a self-defeating one. The real evocation and mystery inherent in the comic form is found in the white lines of ...”

“... case for drugs to be decriminalised, the need for Scottish independence and the novels of Walter Scott. These passages are invigorating not because of the originality of the insights, but because of the unanswerable plainness with which Gray voices them. At one point Tunnock finds himself wakened from a ‘dream of a Scottish Pope being Fascist ...”

“... He regarded the restoration of the French monarchy as a ‘farce’, and was disgusted by Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon. (Scott was ‘arrogant’ and ‘insipid’, Hegel wrote: ‘unacquainted with the characteristic principles that distinguish the essence of the Revolution and give them their almost ...”

“... their divergences became more evident. McInerney achingly, almost poignantly, longed for the F. Scott Fitzgerald doomed glamour of extravagance and careless waste, raptures of the deep followed by hangovers of the damned. McInerney, you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a ...”

“... the key to Renaissance courtly poetry in its strategies for eliciting astonishment. Back home, Jonathan Bate is gobsmacked by the sheer Genius of Shakespeare. It’s perhaps as well to remember that in cooler moments Jonson complained that ‘Shakespeare wanted Art’ and Milton berated Charles I for preferring the Bard to more serious ...”