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“... it’s not about his ancestors and it’s set at the time he was writing it, in the late 1980s. Jonathan Fabrizius, its central figure, is 43 years old and lives comfortably enough, in small part thanks to his earnings as a freelance journalist but chiefly thanks to the uncle who brought him up after the death of his parents and who still sends him a ...”

“... Jonathan Rée takes some tomfoolery from Shakespeare for his title and uses it to create his own striking metaphor. The middle part of his book is about sign languages for the deaf: voices that one sees. The same trope served Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989), but there is more to it than that for Rée ...”

“... the ISI in particular. He made a point of resisting their advances when he took up his diplomatic post in Islamabad, seeing them as ill-intentioned and manipulative. Pakistan ‘is so famous for treachery that it is said they can get milk from a bull,’ he writes. ‘They use everybody, deceive everybody.’ Some of his anger comes from his childhood in ...”

“... history from the earliest Jewish settlement in Poland to the position of Jews in the politics of post-war Poland. There are moving contributions from Wladislaw Bartoszewski and Teresa Prekerowa who lived through the events they describe, and there is a powerful polemical piece by Yisrael Gutman on the historiography of Polish-Jewish relations during the ...”

“... in this pan-European setting, reduced to a kind of stage Oirish (in the dialogues with Pete the Post) or Inspector Clouseau-style French (in the conversations with Jennifer’s friend Marianne, who comes out with things like: ‘You were like a stone on ’er, Scully, an anchor on ’er neck’). But he still conveys very powerfully the Australian’s ...”

“... Claude Rawson as a fluent parodist in the Augustan mode, and by Carolyn Williams as a pioneer of post-colonial resistance to the hegemony of Received Standard English. As several essays here make clear, he is the poet who, above all others, forced the early historians of English literature such as Thomas Warton, Thomas Percy and Samuel Johnson to review the ...”

“... Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to its present position, which is known either as ‘post-structuralism’ or simply as ‘deconstruction’. It is significant that it should bear the date 1979, though, for it is very much a book which closes and summarises the ideas of two decades, not a book which opens a new decade of inquiry. The clarity and ...”

“... Jonathan Lethem’s first novel is set at an indeterminate time in the not too distant future. The United States – and possibly the whole world – is now run by the Inquisition, also known as the Office. You need a licence to ask questions. Everyone has to carry a card which registers how much ‘karma’ they have: the level can be increased or reduced at the discretion of an Office inquisitor – once it drops below zero, you’re taken off to the deep freeze ...”

“... to sofa, cameras capturing their full range of blank expression, the Parsnip and Pimpernel of the post-punk demi-monde. They were compadres but very different writers. McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, a tale of coke squalor and eventual redemption, had a big schmaltzy heart beating in its pigeon breast. Less than Zero, a shockeroo begun when Ellis was a ...”

“... Fosso della Molotta [sic] when we arrived at one coastal farm hamlet.They had an observation post upstairs in a bake house. A battalion commander was staring out a window at the Germans in a farm building, 2000 metres northward. Genially he needled his observer, a young captain called Peter, who needed a haircut and smoked a pipe as he studied the ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell ...”

“... curiosities as Renaissance cross-dressing and the like. Among his colleagues on the board are Jonathan Goldberg, author, among other adventurous works, of Sodometrics: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, Marjorie Garber, a celebrated, good-humoured and energetic advocate of bisexuality, and Jonathan Dollimore, an ...”

“... of thought, especially on but not confined to the Left, holds that the reform of Russia and other post-Communist states is being carried out in such a way as to destroy rather than improve them. The villains are held to be the international financial institutions (IFIs), such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and with them the ...”

“... the gigantic Richard’s Feet, which traces the career of Richard Thurgo, a London solicitor, in post-war Hamburg where he is masquerading as an ex-Nazi. Back in England, Thurgo has been presumed dead for some twenty years after his body was supposedly found in the remains of a burnt-out jeep, the only identifiable features being his well-protected feet ...”

“... which desired and yearned for the earth and not the sky.’ In October 1751 the Whitehall Evening Post carried a description of Signor Grimale’s flying-machine, with which he had ‘once adventured to cross the seas, which was from Calais to Dover, and the same morning arrived in London’. Signor Grimale proposed to give a demonstration flight in London on ...”