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“... in a single programme called ‘Nine Eyes’. A strong proponent of this project is C (Andrew Scott, who wouldn’t look out of place in Cameron’s cabinet), who is intent on merging MI5 and MI6, and a Spectre mole. Shuttering the double-0 programme and retiring Bond are on C’s agenda: 007 is obsolete in the age of drones and wiretaps. This is the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for all of life before Nov 8, 2016.’ Music helps and hurts. In a college classroom I played Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Winter in America’, stirring up my old Nixon-era sense of abjection, and cried in front of my students. Of course, such behaviour makes us eligible for the web-scorn of alt-right triumphalists (‘Anguished by Trump, Lena Dunham Flees to Posh ...”

“... 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 fled the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 immeasurable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 observers ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”