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“... Things were much calmer until the end of the 1990s, when the Institutional Revolutionary Party, in power since the revolution, and the cartels had a tacit agreement: drugs were not to be sold locally but could pass through Mexico, and the murders necessary for the smooth running of business were to be conducted discreetly, without disturbing the daily lives of ...”

“... does the FBI keep files on? Is there a filing cabinet in Washington that contains a rundown of Jonathan Franzen’s feud with Oprah Winfrey? Do the Feds keep track of how many words Joyce Carol Oates writes in a day? Do they monitor Karl Ove Knausgaard’s border crossings? Did they know who Elena Ferrante was before the editors of the New York Review of ...”

“... rise of capitalism, the emergence of a career nobility, the venality of offices), central state power in many European nations was remarkably resilient. The rise of bureaucracy, standing armies, Erastianism and centralised taxation – all strengthened the hand of government. Though habitually written off as sick men, as anachronisms, many European ...”

“... a thesaurus for The Media Casebook, while Sage spins around the colon to distinguish Culture and Power: A Media, Culture & Society Reader from Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader. For the benefit of anyone who hadn’t picked up on the family resemblance, Finkelstein and McCleery call their anthology of ‘book history studies’ ‘a vital ...”

“... affair illuminated the nature of the Saudi regime – modernising yet repressive, profligate with power – and for al-Rasheed, it also had a personal element. She and Khashoggi had clashed for years: in public debates, he was usually invited to speak first, toeing a pro-government line; she would respond by poking holes in narratives of Saudi ...”

“... Indeed, one of its now vanished Persian inscriptions proclaimed “Let him who doubts our power and munificence look upon our buildings.” ’ The student of Islamic architecture is everywhere confronted with the phenomenon of text-laden buildings – of inhabitable books made of stone, brick and stucco. A literate courtier walking through the palace ...”

“... non-patrician. Fielding’s antipathy was partly conditioned by a dislike of the veristic power of Richardson’s novel: its pretence of ‘to the Moment’ narration by a participant in the thick of the action, its particularity of specification, and its thrusting of its readers into an intimacy with the narrative which Fielding seems to have ...”

“... work is at its best when he seems to forget himself, to forget his great mission to undo the power of words, an objective which he explained in a letter, written in German, to Axel Kaun in 1937: It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil ...”

“... published a week before the terrorist attacks, became a runaway bestseller, and the case against Jonathan Franzen and his kind of big social novel did not look so watertight. There may be something too wised-up about these novels, but interest in large-scale fiction has not fallen off after the attacks. Writers quickly settled back into familiar tracks; in ...”

“... In reviewing a book on literary theory recently, a noted American structuralist, Jonathan Culler, drew a stern line between the sort of assumptions about literature that might do for ordinary ‘readers’ and those that are currently giving ‘vitality’, as he put it, to ‘literary studies’. The point is well taken; and it also casts a certain light on the present book, Deconstruction and Criticism, as well as on the general condition (and conditions) of American academic ‘vitality ...”

“... London or Paris, they came to assume that silence meant approval. That wasn’t always the case.To Jonathan Schneer, who has taught modern history in several American universities, ‘the Lockhart Plot seemed … an important subject; also, dramatic, romantic, intrinsically gripping.’ Dramatic and romantic it certainly was, and Schneer has made not one but ...”

“... the ageing mobster grandee in this book, is said to have led his family to ‘the very heights of power’, using only the instruments of ‘a Borgia-like cruelty and a Machiavellian subtleness, plus solid American business know-how’. He has also probably watched the Godfather movies several hundred times. How could we ever tire of such a figure, what would ...”

“... that Northern Ireland contained a large nationalist minority, excluded from any share in political power, which disputed the very existence of the state. This deferential approach was carried over to television when it arrived in 1953, and the rare controversies that arose usually involved material taken from London. In 1958, the BBC showed an interview with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival skills denied. If he is not forced out of office on corruption charges before July 2019, he will be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, overtaking Ben-Gurion. Israeli democracy, the marketing ...”