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“... care for the little animal.’ In my study of robots in Massachusetts nursing homes, 74-year-old Jonathan responds to his robot baby doll by wishing it were a bit smarter, because he would prefer to talk to a robot about his problems than to a person. ‘The robot wouldn’t criticise me.’ Andy, also 74, says that the My Real Baby robotic infant ...”

“... great-grandsons of Queen Victoria: Philipp became the King of Italy’s son-in-law, and Christoph rose to a high rank in the SS. In his engrossing account of their role as mediators between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Royals and the Reich, the American historian Jonathan Petropoulos showed how their ability to smooth ...”

“... The portrait of Rissarro, from Sennett’s early The Hidden Injuries of Class (co-written with Jonathan Cobb, 1972) is as classically, tragically American as Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, only to my mind far richer. Sennett has portrayed other figures who are just as touching and historically illuminating: Rico, the successful, hollowed-out consultant in ...”

“... of the DUP founded by the magnificent fundamentalist preacher Ian Paisley. Their first child, Jonathan, was born, and Iris was brought low by post-natal depression. She sought relief in her local church, where, one day, she found her faith validated by a lovely coincidence. The speaker told the story of a soldier dying in Galwally hospital, and Iris was ...”

“... lesser outbreaks battered London for the next eight years. Whenever deaths from plague in London rose above 30 a week – the number was later raised to 40 – the theatres were ordered shut, with the result (as Leeds Barroll showed in his groundbreaking Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theatre) that from 1603 to 1610 public playhouses were probably ...”

“... novel was, at least until quite recently, a bit short on theory, though Christine Brooke-Rose has done what she could to put that right. What tends to be ignored is the degree to which practically all the modern novelists now admired, though not for their technical stunts, have gone in for ‘experiment’, from James, Ford and Conrad and Joyce ...”

“... is entertaining. The man described in Helen Langdon’s catalogue essay – and, more fully, in Jonathan Scott’s 1995 biography – is loud, deplorable, disarming. Before settling in Rome in 1649 at the age of 34, Rosa had trained in his native Naples and had passed a charmed nine years in and around Florence. That one-time hub of artistic innovation ...”

“... and anxious to extend its power over policy, ministerial appointments and foreign affairs. Tension rose throughout 1992 and reached a climax in March 1993 when an impeachment motion was tabled and failed only narrowly to achieve a two-thirds majority. In April, a referendum was put to the Russian people: did they support the President, did they support his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... abuse which were the lot of the embattled satirist. Johnson had heard the son of Pope’s friend Jonathan Richardson give an account of the poet greeting an attack by Colley Cibber, who was to be crowned King of the Dunces in the final version of The Dunciad. I have heard Mr Richardson relate that he attended his father the painter on a visit, when one of ...”

“... would be ‘honest thief-takers’, not the kind in The Beggar’s Opera, or in Fielding’s novel Jonathan Wild, who colluded with criminals until it became expedient to hand them over to justice. In the early years of the runners some worked as prison turnkeys; others had unexpected former careers: one was an ex-pickpocket, and one a highwayman who had ...”

“... gold teeth in the brutal mouths of tycoons; the newspaper obituaries of dead children – he rose to heaven, he joined the angels – and their tragic white coffins; baroque mouldings; excrescences carved in granite on the vulgar façades of banks; coat and hat racks made with the horns and hooves of deer or mountain goats; coats of arms for common last ...”

“... spontaneous wit besides. I was working with him at the time when Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose was being laboriously raised from the depths of the Solent. This was being done by means of a cradle when suddenly a cable snapped and the wreck slipped back into the water.‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘A slight hiccup on the atypical journey from grave to ...”

“... 2’ in History is a 14-line redaction of that, ending ‘my namesake, not the last Caligula’ (Jonathan Raban once suggested that Lowell’s idea of ‘revision’ was to throw on more negatives). As for ‘Caligula 1’ – that’s a revision of a translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ that first appeared in Imitations. And so on, and so on, and so ...”

“... the ‘B’ in the ‘ABC’ industrial region surrounding São Paulo and the place where he rose to prominence, challenging the military dictatorship by leading strikes and helping to found the PT – the Workers’ Party. His supporters, wearing the party’s red T-shirts, had unfurled a huge banner reading ‘Elections without Lula Are Fraud’ and ...”