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“... in the sense that Archer first agreed to see the author and then thought better of it – Jonathan Mantle sets out to scrutinise Archer’s career. Together with Justice Caulfield he asks, ‘What is his history?’ and then proceeds to unearth information which was never aired in the High Court. There are some interesting passages. ...”

“... of no confidence in the chairman, David Coleridge, and the ruling council. It is clear, then, that Jonathan Mantle has a riveting tale to tell in For whom the bell tolls, and it is a matter of some regret that he tells it so maladroitly. The book is jerky and anecdotal and unstructured. He has tried to combine analysis with prosopography, interweaving the ...”

“... will sell most. Over the last five years the author has assumed Forsyth’s fitfully-worn mantle and established himself as the world-wide super-seller. The Key to Rebecca will follow Eye of the Needle (1978) and Triple (1979) as a surefire triumph. He is now one of a select band of novelists – Forsyth, Maclean and Higgins are others – at the ...”

“... resisted better, back when Trump’s hand seemed not actually to have access to the gas lamp’s mantle. It’s only now, after the shock of his election, that we’re all actually married to him, and living inside his house. In John Ford’s morbid late Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the sociopathic highwayman Liberty Valance, played by Lee ...”

“... remained the property of American writers working more from indigenous than from European models. Jonathan Franzen, an apostate from their ranks, helped make the ex-theorist schlub a stock character. David Foster Wallace, a true believer of sorts, envied Dostoevsky’s pre-postmodern sincerity. Then everything seemed to get turned round and I was suddenly too ...”

“... China and – in the phrase of anguished Americans who backed the wrong horse – he lost China. Jonathan Fenby starts his important new biography, the first of substance for a quarter of a century, in Xi’an in 1936 when Chiang, after his 50th birthday, was preparing to bash the Communists. Having ignored the local armed forces’ evident reluctance to ...”

“... growing interest, including ‘the things things say’ (to borrow the title of a recent study by Jonathan Lamb), a culture’s techne or craft as an index of its level of civilisation, and the nature of self-consciousness before mirrors were commonly available. She wants to find out, she writes, what it felt like to be someone who wore these clothes. She ...”

“... History’ is a case in point. Herbert Butterfield slew it in 1931, and here come John Pocock and Jonathan Clark to slay it again. There is next to nothing in common between them, save their opposition to the Whig Interpretation and its offspring: but it is that opposition which provides both of them with the structure of their argument and the dramatic ...”

“... window and spit on the other children. 12 February. A shoddy programme about the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these 15-year-old boys had been 15-year-old girls and romping round in ...”

“... a dream of green, shaped like a Chinese ideogram, its slender neck flanked by blond beaches, its mantle of grass grazed by over a hundred cattle. These and the unusual number of ploughed fields give it the look of the Highlands two generations ago. We walk southeastward, letting the rising and hollowing of the ground steer our feet deeper into the green ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... between the rival realms of Europe, an idea developed in England by Charles Davenant and Jonathan Swift; on the other, in the ideal of a federation of states to secure the peaceful unity of the continent, as proposed by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre in France. The first became canonical in the diplomatic chancelleries of the time. The second inspired ...”

“... English, they rarely contain any comment either describing or situating the sources they cite; as Jonathan Spence once pointed out, not all report or reminiscence of the period in China is necessarily reliable. Chen’s usage has to be taken on trust, which his judgment otherwise earns. The formidable scholarship on which the book is based yields a compelling ...”