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“... the strategies adopted by these institutions are debated more widely and more knowledgeably. Both Jonathan Steele’s book and John Gray’s essay sharpen a critique which has so far been fragmentary and diffuse. They articulate deeply-felt arguments against the type of reform Russia is undergoing and warn of the dangers of social upheaval if it continues in ...”

“... parable. Last month, two novels appeared which suggest that this process may already be under way. Jonathan Raban’s Foreign Land and Black Marina by Emma Tennant are, from the formal standpoint, very different kinds of novel, but they share, quite strikingly, an un-English pre-occupation with the problem for the individual of belonging in the modern ...”

“... on below-stairs life: most notably Pamela Horn on The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s history of the British nanny (which puts Churchill’s Mrs Everest firmly in her place), and Merlin Waterson’s account of Erdigg, which tells the entire story of a country house from the servants’ standpoint. Above stairs, Mark ...”

“... of his marriage; the truth is that ‘he wanted to see the world for itself. He wanted to see power naked. He wanted to see how bad it was.’ Costello’s legal training shows in his fiction. He writes easily about crooks, priests, lawyers, politicians, victims. And he knows how the world works: how the law works, how the police work, how ...”

“... In office, but not in power’. It seemed unlikely that anything ever said by Norman Lamont would make history, but this phrase from his resignation speech struck a chord. A common charge against Labour governments throughout the century has been that they have been at the mercy of other people’s power; that the combined influence of hostile bankers, businessmen, judges and media moguls ‘blew them off course’, as Harold Wilson put it ...”

“... have to read paintings for evidence of the absences, the repressions, the hiding-places of their power. Of course the overwhelming impression made by Constable’s paintings – especially those images of the Valley of the Stour which were made between 1810 and 1820 or so – is of an extraordinary plenitude. They are wonderfully full of ...”

“... Farncombe have consistently shown us the glory of Handel’s devotion to the theatre. This allows Jonathan Keates to get the balance right in his Handel: The Man and his Music. He admits to being no musician and obviously expects musicologists to deny him admission to the club. He gets in a muddle occasionally over the instrumental music (he fails to see the ...”

“... to the Arabs because both sides claimed the whole country for themselves. Only superior military power, Jabotinsky concluded, could eventually compel the Arabs to accept the reality of a Jewish state. And only an ‘iron wall’ of Jewish military power could protect the Jewish state against continuing Arab ...”

“... that what had pulled him from the semi-obscurity in which he had long since lost his creative power was not the magic of his writing but Coleridge’s death in 1834, an event that prompted the nation to think back and wonder what had happened to that other Lake Poet. There was no correlation between the curve of his poetic value and that of his ...”

“... overcoming all the gender-based habits and assumptions imposed by a rigidly patriarchal culture? Jonathan Culler argues as much in the opening chapters of his recent book On Deconstruction. For Culler, this serves as a paradigm case of the way that deconstructionist strategies of reading can work to undo such naturalised categories as ‘male’ versus ...”

“... federal structure and a proportional system of election so that never again could we concentrate power at the centre, but you took neither of these for yourselves.’ Canadians and Australians could say much the same: the entrenched powers of their provinces and states remain the lynchpins of the remarkably successful federal systems bequeathed by their ...”

“... their Puppettes play.’ Harsnett’s point is that a ritual which seems to manifest supernatural power is no more than a play. Greenblatt’s point, by contrast, is that King Lear is a ritual, all the more powerful because it was created and viewed in a culture familiar with exorcism. What he calls an ‘appropriation’ has taken place, a ‘transfer of ...”

“... in Swift of the brake of pride upon the wheels of vanity. Before he saw England again, the fame, power, advancement and exhilaration he craved would all be his, to the point of suffocation. Every good thing but serenity lay in ambush. But the most important good thing did come. Swift’s triumph was to arrive at something which might look like this old ...”

“... the realms of the rich and the poor. In such circumstances, the principles of legitimacy on which power was to be held were constantly under review. In this sense, Italy was in the avant-garde of political thought in the modern world. Needless to say, wealth and fear threw up various alibis to make sure control remained in a limited number of hands. But if ...”

“... 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 ...”