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“... was published – shortly after Mill’s death in 1873 – it revealed its extraordinary emotional power. ‘Everyone talks of Mill’s Autobiography,’ George Eliot noted, and marvelled at the ‘delight’ the book was giving her. Mill had managed to translate a life of relentless philosophising into an engrossing narrative of doubts, hopes and ...”

“... his astringent dissection of self-serving internationalist hypocrisy is more valuable than ever. Jonathan Haslam’s perceptive and intelligent biography shows how much Carr’s thinking was shaped by the age into which he was born, even if he seemed on the surface to have broken utterly with his origins. ‘For all the dramatic changes that were to occur ...”

“... a troublemaker and we don’t want him here.’ This minor incident goes unmentioned in Jonathan Eig’s new biography of King, of course. But it illustrates a theme to which Eig returns several times. People of every political persuasion now claim King as a forebear. But during his lifetime, King and the civil rights movement aroused considerable ...”

“... sign that US forces did not find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: a truly totalitarian power would have behaved like a bad cop who plants drugs then ‘discovers’ evidence of the crime.) However, although the photographs were only made public at the end of April, the International Red Cross had been sending the US and UK authorities reports of ...”

“... Fourth Geneva Convention begins:To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the co-operation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and ...”

“... you see that her first novel is a nouveau roman; Angela Davis’s struggle typifies the Black Power movement, until you see that it’s Charlotte Corday all over again. Jacqueline Bouvier was born into an age that still thought speaking French was like playing the piano: something upper-class girls did. But French was also a space for her to dream ...”

“... Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (1990), the first book by Jonathan Crary, now Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia. The recent move to digital modes of image production and distribution had prompted Crary to reflect on revolutions in visuality in the past.Techniques of the Observer begins by ...”

“... China and – in the phrase of anguished Americans who backed the wrong horse – he lost China. Jonathan Fenby starts his important new biography, the first of substance for a quarter of a century, in Xi’an in 1936 when Chiang, after his 50th birthday, was preparing to bash the Communists. Having ignored the local armed forces’ evident reluctance to ...”

“... Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated. Thomas, as Robert Frost reminded him, ‘knew the worth of [his] bays’. However, it is unwise to die in war when a hegemonic project like Modernism is getting under ...”

“... social and economic problems – which is why winning the World Cup was held to be so important. Jonathan Fenby’s fine book, On the Brink: The Trouble with France, explores the multi-faceted nature of this crisis, from the decline of the baguette to widespread political corruption. Many British observers (though not Fenby) derive a certain amount of ...”

“... when I read through the club’s much-depleted library forty years later, still had their power to induce despair. (Mr Hewison gallantly eschews all reference, incidentally, to the time-honoured rumour that the Footlights’ archives were left in the back of a taxi by David Frost during the expensive year when he functioned as the club’s ...”

“... such an on-off affair, so fractious, elusive, splattered with froideurs and reconciliations. Jonathan Parry, a specialist in the 19th century, finds that his fellow historians have taken astonishingly little interest in British tangles in the Middle East in the first half of that century, though the relationship was then at its most intense. In fact, the ...”

“... under ‘Religion’. As misrepresentations go, it’s not bad: a deity created in our own image. Jonathan Glover’s book is not exclusively about the Holocaust, but unlike many other atrocities chronicled in this lengthy codex it bags a section to itself, and the culminating one: the Final Solution as grand finale. The book’s subtitle is ‘a moral ...”

“... When the hero of Jonathan Raban’s new novel is scolded for living in a world of his ‘own construction’, the implied rebuke falls flat: this, for Raban, is the whole point of America. Raban’s travel books present America as a ‘glittering fiction’, a country shaped by the ardent imaginings of its immigrant millions and by the universal reach of its popular fables – ‘the mythology of the western and the romance of the frontier ...”

“... certainly follow this pattern. Adam Gray was a sergeant in the tank regiment in which his friend Jonathan Millantz was a combat medic. There is strong evidence that both committed suicide, although their deaths were ruled accidental by the military. Both talked about their experiences, Adam to his mother (whose memories constitute most of the account of his ...”