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“... the movement of the great armies was signalled by an immense smell of sweat preceding them for miles and miles. There is here certainly from time to time the disgust with same-sex physicality, but not the nausea of the male other to be found in Bloom’s exposure to a crowded pub at lunchtime (‘Men. Men. Men.’) or ...”

“... oil as a foodstuff was its use as a coating to stop the tin used for canned food oxidising. As Jonathan Robins notes in Oil Palm: A Global History, ‘few people in the industrialised world ate much palm oil until the 1920s.’ In the United States, it wasn’t officially recognised as a food until 1930 (dairy farmers had fought hard against the new ...”

“... that she and her handlers have been fashioning since the debacle of the 2008 primaries, or so Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes argue in HRC, their inside-dopester account of Clinton’s ‘rebirth’. Allen and Parnes serve as a chorus, commenting portentously on the events described in Hard Choices. Together the two books constitute a vast vanilla pudding ...”

“... of these genres had defeated everyone except very rare, much more experienced talents such as Miles Davis and Captain Beefheart, but the Pop Group were undeterred: not only did they plan to create a new music, they planned to use it to carry the most challenging political lyrics. The music press, which was going through a highbrow phase almost ...”

“... poetry allots him more entries than it does Owen, Graves, Sassoon or Edward Thomas, and by Jonathan Barker, whose 1985 edition of the Selected Poems reprints more than a third of his 800 or so poems. But it was Larkin who made the best case for him, when he included five of Davies’s poems in the Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse. The choices ...”

“... of all single parents. Once, in the car with her, ‘she sped up to what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car and kill us both.’ She lost a nursing job after she rollerbladed through the hospital emergency room, high on painkillers. Vance likes to connect his mother’s drug problem to US immigration ...”

“... but there were other children in the block with whom I played in the spaces of the flats. Helen, Jonathan, Susan, whose doors I knocked on, with whom I would have tea sometimes, who, occasionally, would have tea with me in my flat. So, I still dream about getting back to roam in the corridors, to climb the fire escape, to play the games and tell myself the ...”

“... echo of this imperfectly acknowledged transformation in the more avowedly Marxist work of Jonathan Dollimore. In his absorbing book Radical Tragedy Dollimore made free use of the term ‘essentialism’, meaning the ascription of a permanent, necessary form to reality. He wrote, in a way which still seems bizarre to me, as if Karl Popper had never ...”

“... a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against North Korea’s nuclear reactors at Yongbyon, about sixty miles north of Pyongyang. Then, at the last minute, Jimmy Carter got North Korea to agree to a complete freeze on activity at the Yongbyon complex, and a Framework Agreement was signed in October 1994. The Republican Right railed against this for the next six ...”

“... Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of ...”

“... his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance with prudence has since become so common that Christie’s have now suspended credit card payments altogether.6 January, Yorkshire. Ring Mr Redhead, the coal-merchant at ...”

“... numbers of the damned will confine the victims, how the walls of this prison are four thousand miles thick, the stench intolerable, and, most famously, how eternity in hell can be imagined as a mountain of sand a million miles high, from which, every million years, a bird removes a single grain. Casey adds: Not a single ...”

“... to target. In Move Fast and Break Things, his polemic against the ‘digital-age robber barons’, Jonathan Taplin points to an analysis on Buzzfeed: ‘In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York ...”

“... would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said. The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army ...”

“... Taking advantage of the power of office is more common than not, as the modern morality tale of Jonathan Aitken reminds us. But Chinese corruption has been accompanied by dynamic growth, Indian by a liberalisation of the economy and the development of some highly advanced technology. In Russia, corruption chokes growth and the few efficient parts of the ...”