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“... Jonathan Israel seeks, as few before him have done, to explain the phenomenal rise and then fall of the Dutch commercial hegemony by viewing it against a global background. His theme is its centrality ‘for over a century in the making of the Early Modern world’. His big book comes close to being a history of Europe, even of the whole world, or at least of commercial relations everywhere and the bearing of these on political relations ...”

“... professional from another area – journalism, medicine – who stumbles into an investigation. Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware, who appears in Silent Partner and in Kellerman’s earlier novels, like Blood Test, or When the bough breaks, is a Californian child psychologist who meets violence and misdemeanour all over the place, and not just with ...”

“... the acceptable face of Yeats, and the poetry cannot but rejoice in acceptance/ rejection of male power. All power just is that, revealing indifference to knowledge of those mastered. Yet I take some delight in it all. Man as swan, ‘a holy ghost that looks like Papageno’, expresses his ‘inexpressible ...”

“... writing – the traveller going to an unexciting location and reporting on his lack of excitement; Jonathan Raban and Hugo Williams purvey this mode as well. Is it that old-style travellers chose their destinations better? Did they perhaps fake their enthusiasm? Or was the world simply fresher then? Today’s travellers may claim a greater truthfulness by ...”

“... or less openly and indiscreetly homosexual. There is a sonnet in which Wilde quotes the plea of Jonathan: ‘I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod that was in my hand, and lo! I must die.’ In the Bible story Jonathan has broken Saul’s prohibition against eating, the announcement of which he’d ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the curiosity of mass journals like Newsweek. Amidst this swirl of publicity and controversy, Jonathan Culler has managed to remain calm long enough to write a reasoned defence of deconstruction, one from which both scholars and general readers will be able to learn a good deal. Culler is fairly termed an apologist for the post-structuralist critical ...”

“... outfit of blazer and jeans, probably expensive and Italian. The ostentatious semiotics of Chechen power might make one smile, but they are not without interest; the codes are very precise: in a world where everyone tries to show his place in the order of things by any means possible, it seems that the higher up you are, the more informality you can allow ...”

“... boy who lived down the road. A Galaxy Not So Far Away opens with a brilliant and sad essay by Jonathan Lethem, called ‘13, 1977, 21’, about how he went to see Star Wars 21 times in the summer of 1977 (he was 13), when his mother was gravely ill. ‘I think I came to hate a lot of the film,’ he writes, ‘but I couldn’t permit myself to know it. I ...”

“... through his zealotry, restless ambition and ignorance, single-handedly proceeded to destroy it. Jonathan Parry also provides a forceful celebration of a particular kind of political system, which he sees as achieving perfection under the ‘propertied but unsnobbish’ Whig Ministers who ruled the country in early and mid-Victorian Britain. To anyone ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in its own right. It can still be peered into at the National Gallery (at the moment it is part of Jonathan Miller’s exhibition), which also houses the Fabritius picture. Perhaps it is because they deal so magically with light and space that de Hooch’s pictures make you preternaturally aware of the relationship between flat picture and depicted light and ...”

“... Amerindian and White Negro’. It is all a bit too much, but at least Mellers takes care, unlike Jonathan Cott in his expensive, over-reverential tome: one more coffee-table book. It may seem a bit Dylanesque (i.e. slightly cruel) but I finished Cott’s book without being able to remember what it had been about. Mellers has, at the very least, used his ...”

“... independent judiciary. It was the critical episode in the transformation of Britain from a minor power with a dynastic foreign policy to a major one with an imperial destiny. It laid the foundations of the constitutional practices which would be exported round the world. In Scotland it overthrew the Episcopalian state church and led to the Act of Union. In ...”

“... or was believed to, which sometimes had the same result. Robert Elliott’s classic study of The Power of Satire tells us that poems were used as weapons of war in pre-Islamic Arabia, and it is not only there, or in the curses of primitive tribesmen remote from our literary tradition, that this ‘power’ showed ...”