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“... if no one today knows quite what ‘Gonatas’ meant (‘knock knees’ is one plausible theory). Robin Waterfield wisely takes the city states of European Greece as the backdrop for Antigonus’ life and the arena where his influence was principally felt. The Making of a King is only in part a biography of Antigonus. It also details the decline, economic ...”

“... Halfway​ through my first reading of ‘Liberation Day’, the 63-page title novella of George Saunders’s new collection, a man appears to me. He is not George Saunders exactly – an old version maybe, or a could-have-been. He is speaking the story, or writing it, or daydreaming it at a desk in an empty classroom ...”

“... prescribed tobacco to keep his weight in check, and he obliged them by smoking twenty cigars a day, the same number as Winston Churchill. Though engagingly written, Robin Marantz Henig’s biography adds little that’s new. It is also guilty of perpetuating some colourful but misleading myths. One pertains to the ...”

“... A sugar plantation with its mill, and its businesslike organisation and rhythms of work, bore, as Robin Blackburn points out, a clear resemblance to the factory that emerged with the Industrial Revolution; and its labour force was ‘more intensively exploited than any group of this size in history’. By a kind of poetic justice, of the three commodities ...”

“... about the architecture of such notorious concretised dark stars as London’s Thamesmead and Robin Hood Gardens, or Sheffield’s Park Hill: he has been a passionate proselytiser. Thamesmead’s isolation and the GLC’s policy of dumping tenants on the estate may have been a strong impetus to downward mobility, but nothing should detract from the fact ...”

“... credits are a minor ironic masterpiece. The stirring theme music soars over images of an American robin, the exterior of a sawmill, the machinery inside the mill, snowflakes billowing over a waterfall, fir trees rising majestically behind the town sign: ‘Welcome to Twin Peaks, Population 51,201’. That prominent ‘1’ denoting dead Laura ...”

“... have ‘calamitously misinterpreted’ his thought. The academics and zealots have had their day apparently, and it is time, Wheen says, ‘to strip away the mythology and try to rediscover Karl Marx the man’. If your immediate response is ‘why?’, you’ve probably been off-planet for a few years. The biographical obsession, personality-bound cod ...”

“... had already fled the Philippines. And yet the Tasaday – whoever they are – are there to this day, living in what remains of their jungle. Manda himself is dead but John Nance is still in regular contact and continues to maintain that they are genuine, a story from which he has never wavered for over thirty years. Linguists have identified their dialect ...”

“... Penelope summons Juliet. ‘It’s time,’ she writes. But when Juliet arrives on the appointed day, Penelope has vanished. The news is related with covert, gleeful hostility by the woman who runs the Spiritual Balance Centre – you know the type instantly. But this is the problem. She’s a caricature, just like Don, the Christian minister who appears ...”

“... in Lincoln green gather in the forest round a bulky radiogram struggling to look like a TV set. ‘Robin was certainly impressed with the simulated teak finish.’ More of this could begin to diminish the effect. His peer and contemporary Handelsman does it with Greek myths, folk tales and ‘moments from history’ freaked with verbal witticisms, but Baxter ...”

“... beady eye on the House of Commons. When there are differences between the two main parties of the day, the British adversarial system functions – after a fashion. Depending on the effectiveness or otherwise of Front Bench spokesmen, there is some kind of scrutiny of government performance – as, for example, John Prescott has recently shown in ...”

“... Robin Cook’s memoir concentrates on the first two years of the second Blair government, from his ‘demotion’ to leader of the House immediately after the 2001 general election to his resignation over the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. He may have wanted to get the book out quickly while Iraq, WMDs and Hutton still dominate the headlines, but, more important, writing exclusively about the Blair second term allows him to construct a narrative of political disillusion shorn of awkward questions about the compromises that had been necessary for him to stay loyal to the New Labour ‘project’ before 2001 ...”

“... supplies a devastating corrective to the fashion for unctuous grandstanding. Notorious in his own day as a cynical anti-moralist, Mandeville possessed a prophetic insight into the deformations of the social media age. The psychological traits we now parse as effects of Instagram and Twitter consumption, he recognised as deep-laid elements in our lives as ...”

“... only 14,000 got in. ‘And so,’ Tom Segev writes in 1967, his extraordinary study of the Six-Day War, ‘Israel missed the great opportunity offered by the victory’ to heal ‘the malignant wound … left by the War of Independence’: in less than two decades, ‘the 600,000 Jews living in Israel at its inception took in more than a million new ...”

“... Lecoq and Sherlock Holmes. However, this Master of Crime edition also casts him in a new role. Robin Walz’s introduction puts paid to the notion that Vidocq was a Victorian Robin Hood: ‘In Vidocq the criminal and detective are one. He was the world’s first anti-hero rogue cop.’ The editor’s preface ...”