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“... Once primarily interested in economic history, Jonathan Israel has more recently turned his attention to the intellectual roots of Western modernity in the 18th-century Enlightenment. In the 1980s, critics on the left would have told him not to bother. During that decade the Enlightenment became a prime target in the American culture wars ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie Jacques, not to mention the pre-teen Julie Andrews – without ever being upstaged. In performance he would always hit the spot. The secret of his extraordinary popularity was his voice. His high-pitched giggles and squeaky rasping speech might ...”

“... at deserted stops, and made a sleepy epic of the round trip, which was little more than 40 miles. I begrudged even the very few passengers we picked up on these slow trawls through the Hampshire countryside, because they interrupted my reading of Seven Types of Ambiguity, in its blue-barred Peregrine paperback edition, which lived for weeks inside the ...”

“... said it had discovered the Bonhomme Richard using satellite imagery – not twenty or so miles out to sea, where the Americans had been looking, but close to the shore in Filey Bay.In 1779 the War of Independence was in its fifth year. France, keen to exact revenge on Britain for the Seven Years’ War, had signed a treaty with the Thirteen ...”

“... dead fish appeared in the new Town Lake in Austin and in the river for a distance of about five miles below the lake. None had been seen the day before. On Monday there were reports of dead fish 50 miles downstream. By this time it was clear that a wave of some poisonous substance was moving down in the river water … a ...”

“... a precedent for seafarers being made legally responsible for their ships and detained. Just fifty miles away, Muhammad Aisha, a Syrian seafarer, was being forced to remain alone on board the Bahraini-flagged MV Aman, at anchor in the Gulf of Suez. Aisha had been hired in May 2017 as the Aman’s first mate. The ship was owned by a Bahraini company called ...”

“... for Wasilla itself – quite unlike its rival and contemporary in the valley, Palmer, 11 miles to the east – is a centreless, sprawling ribbon of deregulated development along a four-lane highway, backed on both sides by subdivisions occupied by trailer-homes, cabins, tract-housing and ranch-style bungalows, most built since 1990. It’s a generic ...”

“... work O.M. Manning, but it was as Olivia Manning that in 1937 she published The Wind Changes with Jonathan Cape. In being acquired by Cape, Manning made an acquisition of her own. More striking than beautiful, with down-turned dark eyes and very slender legs, she was extremely interested in sex, and the more of it she experienced the more fashionably ...”

“... visible’. On 1 March 1954, the US tested a hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll, showering 7000 square miles of the Pacific with fallout. Along with 28 military personnel and 239 Marshall Islanders, 23 men on a Japanese tuna boat – the Lucky Dragon No. 5 – were exposed. Their contaminated catch had already been sold when they were hospitalised with radiation ...”

“... of Vincent Cronin’s laudatory 1955 biography, still in print today. He was also at the centre of Jonathan Spence’s 1984 study, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, which focused on Ricci’s use of the classical ars memoriae as a way of gaining access to members of China’s educated elite, whose interest in techniques that might help them memorise the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of capitalism’, and the Obristian motto ‘Don’t Stop’ perfectly suits the work regime that Jonathan Crary called, in a recent polemic, ‘24/7’.3 Second, the shift in exhibition-making with Szeemann and König has had ambiguous consequences, which might be captured by way of a statement made by Jean-François Lyotard – ‘the exhibition is a ...”

“... published a week before the terrorist attacks, became a runaway bestseller, and the case against Jonathan Franzen and his kind of big social novel did not look so watertight. There may be something too wised-up about these novels, but interest in large-scale fiction has not fallen off after the attacks. Writers quickly settled back into familiar tracks; in ...”

“... a complete stranger in the centre of a crowded dance-floor is still something worth driving 200 miles for; it is worth the risk of arrest on drugs charges, worth a face-off with the police in a muddy field. Indeed, the fact that the state has seemed so concerned to prevent the formation of such obviously communal events is a source of moral confusion for ...”