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“... after legend’ arrived at the table. He counts them in: Alan Sugar, Carol Vorderman, Jonathan Ross, Miriam Stoppard, Tony Parsons. Even for someone who started his career in national journalism as a showbiz reporter on the Sun, these are pitifully undemanding exemplars of legends. At one party he is quite near to someone who might just ...”

“... parallels complemented literary and mythological allegories. In The Crisis of 1614, essays by Jonathan Gibson and Stephen Clucas show Ralegh’s cousin Sir Arthur Gorges adapting Lucan’s verse history of Rome’s civil wars, and Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Cotton rewriting the reign of Henry III, with an eye to Jacobean political anxieties. Cotton was ...”

“... that’s what he says in his memoirs, where he insists that he only worked out how to exercise power effectively towards the end of his time in office. Now he wants to help others start out with the wisdom he had to acquire through ‘bitter experience’. But political leaders always say this: that governing starts to make sense when time is running ...”

“... the man who had frightened her was Christopher Clunis, on trial at the Old Bailey for murdering Jonathan Zito on the northbound Piccadilly Line platform at Finsbury Park tube station on 17 December 1992. According to his solicitor, Christopher Clunis, who was found guilty of manslaughter and sent to Rampton Hospital, is ‘contemplating’ suing North East ...”

“... a year. We can perhaps assume therefore that his real doubts were to do with Ezra’s staying power, or with the staying power of Bel Esprit’s subscribers. Year One would be fine but what about Years Two and Three? Pound talked of five-year plans but was this merely talk? And there was another complication. Even as ...”

“... print debut in the 1709 miscellany, which also contained work by rising names like Anne Finch and Jonathan Swift. His sumptuous editions of classical poets in Latin or English (Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Ovid, Virgil) cast reflected glory on his vernacular list. When an ambitious Oxford graduate called Basil Kennett told Tonson in 1696 that he felt ...”

“... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers ...”

“... necessarily involved negotiated compromises: because it needed legitimacy, it had to possess a power not primarily coercive but consensual. To sustain hegemonic authority, the law had to be (more or less) accepted by the man in the street – anyone likely to be robbed or mugged and any potential juryman. After all, nobodies as well as nobs had their stuff ...”

“... author has donated far too much of her time to media book-gabble and the smokefree backrooms of power. Indeed, she could be said to have invented a new form of fiction – whereby the promotional interviews are conducted within the text. The phobia about the Thames flooding through the Greenwich foot tunnel suffered by the wimpish Frances Peverell signals ...”

“... of Old Europe loathes Parker, and for reasons not dissimilar to those for the hatred of Bush: the power both are seen to wield is as coercive as it is crude and clumsy. The numbers do not tell the whole story here: indeed, the numbers may be a red herring. Between a 20-point scale and a 51-point scale (which is what Parker’s amounts to), the issue can ...”

“... realise. We don’t merely change over time, we (more grandly) grow. In this collection of essays Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, wants to show us that it is what he calls the ‘logic of the soul’ to want open-mindedness; and this is because, in his view (and in the tradition of psychoanalysis that he values), the logic of the soul is a ...”

“... History’ is a case in point. Herbert Butterfield slew it in 1931, and here come John Pocock and Jonathan Clark to slay it again. There is next to nothing in common between them, save their opposition to the Whig Interpretation and its offspring: but it is that opposition which provides both of them with the structure of their argument and the dramatic ...”

“... still fell to the inevitable; and last year he saw off Fabiano Caruana to retain the title. Brin-Jonathan Butler’s The Grandmaster, which focuses on the Karjakin match, doesn’t provide any evidence that it ‘made chess great again’, despite the book’s subtitle. The match left the peak of the chess world undisturbed. The main surprise was that ...”

“... any good, either, which is to overlook not only the work of such writers as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, but also Ronald Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica, a TV series that’s as intelligent, nuanced and unflinching an examination of the United States’ post-9/11 militarism, foreign policy and relation to the un-American other as you are ...”

“... normal media service resumed. This, too, was a miscalculation by the grand manipulator. As his power slipped away, opinion-formers wheeled and squawked. For 24 hours, friendly journalists stuck to Mandelson’s script and tried to deflect attention onto Brown; they then covered Mandelson’s resignation with wistful predictions of his return. Routledge ...”