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“... Southern Ming politics are a quagmire, and Wakeman is not always clear in presenting them. The post-conquest Manchu regent Dorgon, shrewd though he was, emerges here as a paragon, as does Emperor Shunzhi after he took personal power. Both men need more highly nuanced study if they are to be fully understood. (One should maybe emphasise that the ...”

“... parody like this will be worth any amount of the over-careful realism practised in more solemn post-imperial novels.Not all of the treatment is facetious. Duncan Thaw remarks in Lanark that ‘if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively,’ and just as Gray’s novels to date have enormously enriched the ...”

“... Peak District and Snowdonia.’ They also offer views of miles of industrial, rather than post-industrial, satellites, which do not accord with the RGS’s ‘Discovering Britain’, an embarrassing programme of ‘Marmite landscapes’ and ‘tiny treasure hunts’. There are yet further views, equally outside the RGS version of Britain. Beyond the ...”

“... still firmly Marxist at base, but has a more flexible superstructure shaped by various brands of Post-Structuralism, most notably Deconstruction, feminism and, latterly, the carnivalesque of Bakhtin. But in fact there are three phases, roughly divisible according to decade, and the first of these, which Eagleton has persistently suppressed in interviews and ...”

“... see the would-be recipients, waiting for messages that will never arrive, and then a postman at a post office, stranded by war. He sorts and reads the letters that have amassed, ‘like the piles of dead leaves spilling over the kerbs at the corners of deserted streets’. Hassan Blasim’s God 99 is a less disciplined undertaking. Like Barakat, who left ...”

“... and soil impose perennial constraints on warfare and agriculture. A striking example is found in Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China: ‘Chiang Kai-shek [in 1949] had roughly the same range of options that had faced the southern Ming court once the Manchus had seized Peking and the North China plain 305 years before. He could try to consolidate a ...”

“... Trying to make sense​ of Jonathan Lethem’s fiction as a whole is something of a fool’s errand: there is no easily discernible line from the early hipster science fiction to his big-selling detective story Motherless Brooklyn (1999), to his Cobble Hill coming-of-age novel The Fortress of Solitude (2003) to his intricate, ironic New York Buddenbrooks, Dissident Gardens (2013 ...”

“... of Descartes and the inanity of Carnap, but with their inspiration Rorty began to advocate a post-philosophical culture in which everyone would accept that knowledge has count less varieties, all suited to different human purposes, and none intrinsically superior to any other. In the new democratic order we would realise that there are no magic skyhooks ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... managed: ‘One of the ways in which this dream of mastery and possession becomes reality in the post-Christian era is through the rise of forest management during the late-18th and 19th centuries.’ Trees were planted with Cartesian precision, in straight lines. Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees tells of an 18th-century nobleman who climbed a ...”

“... rates of interest to the fundholders who had financed the war. Taxpayers suffered badly in the post-war depression, and William Cobbett led a bitter national protest at the stockholding leeches who, he claimed, were sucking the lifeblood from John Bull. At times of economic tension over the following twenty years, the fundholder and the landowner competed ...”

“... doctrine as ‘idealism’ will have put some readers off, but he understood the word in his own, post-classical way. Idealism in his sense implied, first, that human existence is thoroughly historical, in that the concepts, stories, schemes and emotions by which we set store are continuous cultural processes which got underway thousands of years ago and will ...”

“... the 18th century and its over-investment in the power of reason. Postmodernism was nothing if not post-Enlightenment. The idea of the Enlightenment goes back to the 18th century itself, in particular to Kant and a miniature essay called ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ which he wrote in 1784. He started by acknowledging that we all have an ingrained desire to ...”

“... look the odder it gets. There is, at least superficially, a limit to this. Facts, so belaboured by Post-Modernism, prove pertinacious in the face of atrocity. It’s notable that the dogma of social constructionism, lately so infarcted in cultural and literary studies, has had little to say about the creation of ‘the Holocaust’, long dignified with the ...”

“... of the covert bond which unites them, at least in retrospect, as key figures in British post-war comedy. Both were gay; both were in the closet; and both, therefore, were fully tapped into that vein of sexual subterfuge and masquerade which has always been central to the British sense of humour. Both idolised Sid Field, and learned some of the basic ...”