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“... occasions in these last years is King Lear: ‘Marvellous!’ But he had no delusions about his power on earth. He knew that he was as dominant, and was in the eyes of many as god-like, as Lear had been. This awareness requires us to tread carefully in interpreting his political career. And, for all its invaluable help in fathoming him, the diary, like a ...”

“... and are the one in charge, even if you end up getting apples instead because the pears look bad. Jonathan Meades is a writer who understands the power of lists. In An Encyclopedia of Myself, he has written not so much an autobiography as a series of detailed inventories of English provincial life in the 1950s – a world ...”

“... have had to accept a welfare state. Conservatives originally stressed the limits to government power, in order to defend property rights and the authority and status of local landowners, and still instinctively do so. However Fawcett sees, more clearly than many of conservatism’s opponents, that few conservatives have made hostility to the state a ...”

“... story but that scarcely renders it safe, for Venus is the active party, Adonis the pursued. As Jonathan Bate says, the poem is partly about a woman who wishes to rape a man and is frustrated by physiological difference. The magisterial Jonson, in his play Poetaster, drew the moral conclusion: if that is what Ovid is really like, then Ovid must go, and ...”

“... and order to his life within his own community and his own descent group, has within him the power to draw together the worlds of family, rites and community into a concept that has both a cultural and a national force – that of the ‘whole people’s descent group’ (minzu). But however carefully Dennerline studied the local community, Qian ...”

“... and ‘perpetual adjustment’ were indeed the preconditions of Calvino’s stubborn faith in the power of words to render the specificity of the physical world. The same challenge is addressed, albeit in attenuated form, in Under the Jaguar Sun, a new collection of three stories (only one of which is previously unpublished). The idea, first taken up by ...”

“... for leaving no visible marks. As anyone who’s gone to a rock concert or rave knows, its power lies in the fact that it seems inescapable, at once outside and inside the listener’s body: ‘what better medium than music to bring into being … the experience of the West’s (the infidel’s) ubiquitous, irresistible ...”

“... or as Lorrie Moore uses Mother and Baby in ‘People like That Are the Only People Here’. Jonathan Lethem has said that ‘strange character names are an easy way to make sure the reader feels, at the deepest level, they’re entering a propositional space where they have to suspend some of their reading protocols and suspend disbelief and make ...”

“... in silence, refusing to answer reporters’ questions: it ‘looked like a perp walk’, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian. ‘He isn’t playing the game,’ the Times journalist Jenni Russell complained on Newsnight. It was a metaphor, and it wasn’t. Corbyn was being tested: not on his policies, which have hardly been at issue so far, but ...”

“... share of the vote from 9.8 per cent to 11.4 per cent: not nearly enough to give it the balance of power or the right to claim a victory. The PSI had inadvertently pushed the rock which started what my sociologist friend kept calling the ‘landslide’. Who won? The little parties of the centre gained considerably. The Republican Party, the party of the ...”

“... have become best-sellers: for example, Simon Schama’s Citizens, Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland. Jonathan Spence’s Search for Modern China. And now here comes another one, 813 pages of it, which is virtually certain also to be a best-seller, at least in Britain. The general outlines of the decline and fall of the British landed establishment from 1880 to ...”

“... and certainly not the TUC – still thinks that wage levels should be determined solely by market power. As long as Mrs Thatcher was prime minister, the Cabinet had to pay lip service to the old free-market faith. At first the new Cabinet will probably do the same, but its deeds are unlikely to match its words. As a backbencher, Michael Heseltine was groping ...”

“... acts of violence or heroic self-sacrifice. From a philosophical point of view, the practical power of moral concepts has always been a bit of a mystery. Plato attributed it to the intrinsic attraction of the idea of the good, while anti-Platonists invoked long-range calculations of self-interest. But MacIntyre cut out the metaphysics: all we need to ...”

“... Chinese counterparts, Greek intellectuals were far more often isolated from the seats of political power.’ Second, in Greece there was a ‘lack of bureaucratisation: there was no institution analogous to the Chinese astronomical bureau.’ Third, a Greek was not required to produce any ‘formal qualifications’ in order to teach or to practise as a ...”

“... since 1983, when he was a student of Pashto during the Soviet occupation. When Gorbachev took power and started negotiating the Soviet withdrawal Avetisyan was sent to Kabul for two years as a diplomat. He went back again in 1989, after the troops left, and watched Najibullah’s Soviet-backed regime survive for three more years. When mujahedin leaders ...”