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“... the fall of empires in Europe, and the Little Ice Age did the same for the Ming dynasty in China. Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History (2023) studied plagues and their effects from the Stone Age to the present: it was a plague pandemic around 3000 BCE that cleared the way for the incursion into Europe of the Western Steppe ...”

“... surrounded by trees, a park maybe, and I was looking up at the sky. Above my head, behind me, rose a great crane, like the gantry cranes you see in ports, blue with dark red parts. Ramzan was standing at the top, at the tip of the cantilever, and was having men tied together in twos, some in uniform, others in civilian clothes, thrown over the edge. I ...”

“... knows) married his 13-year-old cousin. Strane teaches her the etymology of her name, invented by Jonathan Swift for a pupil 22 years younger than him. ‘Swift once knew a woman named Esther Vanhomrigh, nickname Essa,’ Strane tells her. ‘He broke her name apart and put it back together as something new … Van-Essa became Vanessa. Became you.’The first ...”

“... writing about her. Since the rediscovery of B.S. Johnson (if that’s what it was) that followed Jonathan Coe’s biography a few years ago there’s been a wave of enthusiasm for ‘experimental fiction’. A new crop of writers such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Davey, Will Eaves, Eimear McBride and Eley Williams, all published by independent ...”

“... satire to bearing witness has always felt uneasy. The explicitness of the rhetoric and the obvious rose tinting (what became of the carp?) pull the revelations back towards the confected world they were intended to break through. You might dismiss them as a hippyish injunction to ‘wonder’, aimed at the popular audience Coupland has always nurtured. Yet ...”

“... fields Rise and enlarge their suburbs. In Bage’s lifetime, the population of Birmingham rose from 15,000 to 70,000. The ironworks in which he had an interest may have failed but with his involvement Bage had taken a stake in the future. Older attitudes lingered, however. A reviewer of Joseph Priestley’s Memoirs claimed in 1806 that ‘there is ...”

“... on claims that a concern to maintain racial purity increasingly trumped other social ambitions; Jonathan Parry offers a careful account of the decline of institutional reform. All these historians are reliable, sober and meticulous. But they appear to have forgotten that we need strong arguments, even wrong arguments: the job of the historian is to make a ...”

“... every week. Religious revivals prove temporary. The people of Florence soon wearied of Savonarola. Jonathan Edwards, preaching God’s wrath in the 1730s in my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, brought his congregation to paroxysms of weeping, despair and repentance, but after the ‘great awakening’ had spread through the region and made him ...”

“... to squeeze whatever fun might be had.The stage was set for what Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, claimed would be ‘a change from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system’. The staff at Number Ten used, notoriously, to be no larger than the staff of a mayor in a middle-sized German town. Over the last decades, it has swelled ...”

“... judgments, or one in which they would change global reality. Parker has only a walk-on role in Jonathan Nossiter’s superb Mondovino, but he is the éminence grise of one of the most effective and moving political documentaries of recent years. The arch-villain is Parker’s long-time friend, the Bordeaux ‘flying wine consultant’ Michel ...”

“... him for the entrance examinations and ends up reading English at Hertford College, ‘where Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh had once been students’. ‘I seldom speak of it,’ he confesses, ‘because to say “When I was at Oxford ...” sounds suspect even to me, like the opening of one of my father’s bullshit stories.’ At Oxford, Wolff has a ...”

“... venerated alongside Alexander Pope, who held that ‘Most Women have no Characters at all,’ or Jonathan Swift, who, at the conclusion of that catalogue of excremental horrors ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, has his speaker remark: ‘Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?’ Or even ...”

“... intelligence alliance is Aldrich’s main subject, though the reality comes nowhere near the rose-tinted preview I’ve just given. The marriage took place in the mid-1940s, but the details of the contract are still secret. It is clear, however, that from the start the US wanted Britain not for its mind (those clever code-breakers) but for its ...”

“... however, they were paramount. Here they eclipsed outlaw heroes of folk tradition – Dick Turpin, Jonathan Wild, Dick Sheppard – and usurped the leadership of the police in the fight against delinquency and disorder. The prolific Stephen Knight has calculated that Sherlock Holmes had at least 13 predecessors, some of them women. Most were quickly ...”

“... And there also emerged the self-employed ‘thief-catcher’ – the most celebrated was Jonathan Wild, immortalised by Fielding. Such self-appointed sleuths cashed in on the lavish Parliamentary rewards newly offered for those bringing successful prosecutions. With a thief-catcher clearing up to £140 per case – far more than an artisan’s annual ...”