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“... in Hazlitt’s own outlook and essays. ‘The Example of Hazlitt’ occupies the second part of Jonathan Bate’s book, by far its longest section, and the whole literary atmosphere of Regency London, seen through Hazlitt’s eyes and those of his two critics, is alive with Shakespearean character and quotation, with the wiles of Shylock and the arrogance ...”

“... more revealingly shows the untidiness and uncertainties of a popular upheaval.At the heart of Jonathan Beecher’s Writers and Revolution is a simple but powerful idea: to follow nine contemporary intellectuals – d’Agoult, the novelists George Sand, Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, the statesman Lamartine, the liberal theorist and parliamentarian ...”

“... for the transformation of English bodies is largely medical. But in England, this transformative power was also understood in theatrical terms. In his bizarre treatise The Unloveliness of Lovelocks (1628), an extended jeremiad against the fashion for men to wear their hair long, the radical Protestant William Prynne bemoaned what we might now think of as the ...”

“... lens of the mind can hardly be turned onto itself and it may be easier to appreciate its unifying power if we look at its more distant achievements. There is a school of psychologists who suggest that the real person is not an elusive self au-dessus de la mêlée but simply the sum of the roles that he plays: we are like actors who never come off-stage, and ...”

“... diplomats and generals said no. Such is the tangled and perplexing sequence of events that Jonathan Steinberg undertakes to unravel. He adds that the same story occurred in Greece, and subsequently in South-Eastern France following the Allied landings in North Africa and the Axis takeover of what had previously been the Unoccupied Zone. For 13 months ...”

“... group of generals, he was kept under house arrest for three years. When the army relinquished power in 1999 and installed Obasanjo, Buhari sat tight. In 2003 and 2007 he was the All Nigeria People’s Party candidate for president. His prospects looked poor: Nigerians remembered his brief premiership for its draconian anti-corruption drive. Buhari had ...”

“... of the boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgency era and warned of ‘the growth of China’s military power’. The document’s familiar jargon – it called for ‘credible deterrence’ and the need to ‘project power despite anti-access/area denial challenges’ – was followed up with action in the region: new military ...”

“... abolition to their own and allied governments – Mrs Thatcher was particularly scathing. But as Jonathan Schell points out in The Gift of Time, ‘history often creates a problem whose only real solution lies beyond the pale of current political acceptability.’ Reykjavik expanded the pale: it brought the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons into the realm ...”

“... and shifting political stances have at times dulled the sheen.’ In The Chan’s Great Continent Jonathan Spence reflects on 48 ‘sightings’ or mis-sightings of ‘a great but distant culture’, stretching from the 13th century up to the Seventies. Was Marco Polo really in China between 1275 and 1292, working as an agent of the Mongol ruler, Kublai ...”

“... from the centre to the periphery. It is only in the last few years, thanks to scholars such as Jonathan Brown and some of his Spanish colleagues, such as Julian Gallego, that the art of 17th-century Spain is beginning to be seen again in its intellectual, social and political context. Jonathan Brown is the author of ...”

“... compared to other items of luxury consumption such as jewellery or silver-plate’, according to Jonathan Brown in Kings and Connoisseurs, who makes the comparison vivid by observing that the cost of lace on a gown worn in 1613 by the daughter of James I was, at £1700, ‘more valuable than all but a few paintings in the famous collection of his ...”

“... And many of Maschler’s authors weren’t household names in Britain until he published them at Jonathan Cape. His stable has included Philip Roth, García Márquez, McEwan, Martin Amis, Barnes, Rushdie, Vonnegut, Chatwin, Fowles, Deighton and, Maschler does not fear to admit, Jeffrey Archer. The title he was most excited to publish was Catch 22, a novel he ...”

“... was published – shortly after Mill’s death in 1873 – it revealed its extraordinary emotional power. ‘Everyone talks of Mill’s Autobiography,’ George Eliot noted, and marvelled at the ‘delight’ the book was giving her. Mill had managed to translate a life of relentless philosophising into an engrossing narrative of doubts, hopes and ...”

“... his astringent dissection of self-serving internationalist hypocrisy is more valuable than ever. Jonathan Haslam’s perceptive and intelligent biography shows how much Carr’s thinking was shaped by the age into which he was born, even if he seemed on the surface to have broken utterly with his origins. ‘For all the dramatic changes that were to occur ...”

“... a troublemaker and we don’t want him here.’ This minor incident goes unmentioned in Jonathan Eig’s new biography of King, of course. But it illustrates a theme to which Eig returns several times. People of every political persuasion now claim King as a forebear. But during his lifetime, King and the civil rights movement aroused considerable ...”