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“... hierarchy of the genres, but it was easier to see what painting should not be than what it should. Jonathan Richardson’s Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715) set off boldly from the notion that the artist must not merely represent nature, only to suggest awkwardly that art should portray what was rarely seen or ‘what never was, or will be in fact, though ...”

“... lid was clamped on nationalist aspirations. In 1848 patriotic rebellions broke out all over Italy. Jonathan Keates’s The Siege of Venice examines the longest-lived of the rebel states that came into being. With its broad view of the 1848 experience across Italy and its detailed account of political developments and divisions in Venice through the city’s 18 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of monotony’ – but that hasn’t stopped reviewers of the Tate show serving up stale critique. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian called Burne-Jones ‘stupid’, while to Waldemar Januszczak of the Sunday Times – ‘send all his hopeless droopers to the gym’ – he is merely ‘ridiculous’. Tim Hilton made better reading in 1970, when he observed in his ...”

“... and dissimulate also seems to carry subversive tints of the sort associated with his contemporary Jonathan Swift.The Grumbling Hive provides an allegorical account of a thriving early 18th-century economy, in the form of a colony of heavily anthropomorphised bees. Christian and Stoic moralists recommended virtuous austerity, but Mandeville depicts its ...”

“... defeat of the IRP in 2000, and then the closure of the American border after 9/11, provoked the swift collapse of the agreement. Given that the cartels are better financed, better organised and no doubt better equipped than the state, which is in any case rotten to the core, a return to the way things used to be could seem like the lesser evil, even in the ...”

“... pear and reading a book.’ What interested him about Gide? Barthes’s answer might be taken as a swift epitaph on himself, four brief sentences wonderfully afloat on all they don’t say: ‘He was a Protestant. He played the piano. He talked about desire. He wrote.’ An earlier, more militant remark is worth pondering too: ‘between jargon and ...”

“... It is not so much the chronicle of an illness as the record of one or two lives: ‘He was a swift worker; no one else could set as many ens per hour as he could.’ The couple have a son, Aaron, who was born from Erna’s ‘only union with Eugene, which took place at the end of the week of mourning’ Eugene’s mother’s death. ‘Union’ had not ...”

“... into the Beatnik era, establishing important transatlantic connections with Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, Lorine Niedecker and others. The break-up of his first marriage in 1964 terminated this period of relative stability, initiating the chapter of uncertainty that coincided with his first letters to Stephen Bann. At no stage in Finlay’s ...”

“... with the purest of intentions. ‘It was not so much the hatred she was interested in as the swift attenuation, as if their collective blood had made a decision.’ This is the world she participates in creating:It was a place where she knew what was going to happen, it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in ...”

“... in whom SF riffs are completely subsumed in metaphor. Elsewhere, Lem Two seems to glance back to Swift, Voltaire and Gogol, or sideways to Borges and Pynchon. These are names the SF tradition has often used to decorate its wrong-side-of-the-tracks clubhouse. Yet those writers would be bewildered at the clannish rituals and arcane litmus tests typical of the ...”

“... the other hand, the event was so crass that one wondered if it had not been entirely imagined by Jonathan Swift or Paul Durcan, whose poem ‘What Shall I Wear, Darling, to the Great Hunger?’ is included in Tom Hayden’s book Irish Hunger.During the week before the Bank Holiday concert, John Waters wrote:This weekend, courtesy of the Minister [Avril ...”

“... least, on Lowell, Auden, Plath, Heaney, Ashbery and many more. He made his name as a specialist on Swift, where his monumental biography, completed in 1983, has told us more than any previous source about the man, his works and the age, to draw on a subtitle Victorian in its confident amplitude. His most lasting book may yet prove to be Literary Meaning and ...”

“... enclosure, reprinted in Healy’s collection, one of Marvell’s most interesting recent critics, Jonathan Crewe, shows how ‘The Garden’ exposes ‘a widespread cultural fantasy of the supposedly autonomous, originary masculine subject’. This, though Crewe does not say so, is because Marvell’s irony uses a form of camp to unsettle conventional ...”

“... and Mack so reticent about the ‘frequently homoerotic correspondence’ between Pope and Swift? What of Gay, ‘who never married and whose psychological attachment to the older, if occasionally paternal, Pope merits more attention than it has received?’ Not for the first time Rousseau’s enthusiasm gets the better of his facts here: Gay was ...”