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“... 1768 and Smollett in 1771. Among his contemporaries, only Frances Burney was at the height of her powers. Neither Ann Radcliffe, whose Gothic romances would soon enjoy immense popularity, nor the younger radical novelists such as Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Holcroft – with whom Bage is most commonly linked – had yet begun to publish. In these ...”

“... The purpose of hard work was not to achieve material success, but to develop the self – its powers, range, creativity and diversity. The longest chapter in Self-Help is devoted to ‘workers in art’, an odd choice for a man later condemned as the arch-philistine of the mid-Victorian generation. Granted, Smiles’s artist paints with elbow grease as ...”

“... doing something, you’ve got to shout about it. ‘It’s not about trying to ape Farage,’ Jonathan Ashworth, former MP and now head of the think tank Labour Together, said. ‘But where we have a story to tell, like on the returns figures, Labour MPs should be talking a lot about that.’The Home Office has long been called on to play bad cop by ...”

“... the process and attempted to raise the fashionable into the sublime, he became less certain of his powers and therefore more servile in his copying.’ Among the remaining essays, there is a pair which hinge on West and Copley, both of which bring out the crucial importance of West’s picture of the death of Wolfe. We knew well enough that this was a ...”

“... all this aggro? Prestige, supposedly. Britain ‘ached to join’ the ‘new super-club of sigint powers, of which there were only two members, America and Russia’; ached to ‘remain one of the world’s leading intelligence powers’; to have ‘something no other European country had’; to become ‘the biggest fish ...”

“... of life during World War Two. And second, comedy also has an extra appeal – at least for Jonathan Lynn and me – when it is actually about something, in the sense that Butterflies and The Good Life are about something.Johnny and I were writing the first script of Yes, Minister at the time that I was deeply involved with Milton Friedman in developing ...”

“... appointees to direct civil servants was a v-sign directed at the backs of Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell.) The other omission is more sinister. It has always been part of the objection to Campbell that he briefed and spun against members of his own government, and that he was ruthless both in the way he rationed access and favours to the press (which ...”

“... were reduced from 402 to 157 seats, and then by the Parliament Act of 1911, which clipped the veto powers of the House of Lords. Between 1912 and 1914 Ulster Unionists and their fellow diehard anti-Home Rulers appeared to flirt with insurrection and civil war. The Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law, declared in a speech at Blenheim in 1912 that he could ‘imagine ...”

“... Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of ...”

“... patrol exploded prematurely, killing two boys near the border,’ pipes up seven or eight-year-old Jonathan from the front row, like a miniature newscaster. ‘They died instantly.’ Cushla Lavery, the class’s teacher and the young Catholic protagonist of Trespasses, Louise Kennedy’s first novel, hates the ritual of The News and the specialist vocabulary ...”

“... inchoate hopes and dreams: ‘For some reason I have never lost faith,’ writes the narrator of Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!, ‘not since I was a young child, in the power of letters to transform my existence . . . there is the white envelope, that glorious rectangle of pure possibility which has even shown itself, on some occasions, to be nothing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... any good, either, which is to overlook not only the work of such writers as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, but also Ronald Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica, a TV series that’s as intelligent, nuanced and unflinching an examination of the United States’ post-9/11 militarism, foreign policy and relation to the un-American other as you are ...”

“... image of capitalism as the half-mad sorcerer of modernity – ‘no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’. Protagonists of the Marxism that Marx himself disowned have always emphasised the rational, economics-led side of the famous forecasts, epitomised as ‘historical materialism’. However, what ...”

“... the death of Franz Josef, made strenuous efforts to broker peace between Austria and the Entente powers via Princess Sarsina, a member of the Habsburg network conveniently domiciled in neutral Switzerland. ‘Austria,’ Zita was reported to have said, ‘did not desire to be ruined for the sake of saving Alsace-Lorraine for Germany.’ The Germans got wind ...”