“... had died. But he was sharing a condo with a woman friend who always overestimated the remedial powers of sexual aerobics. Or maybe she only underestimated the progress of his heart disease. We all knew it was coming. In the first year of his widowhood, he sat in his chair, heartsore, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then he started going out with ...”

“... press and leading Southern politicians to assert that they were ‘pawns in the hands of Communist powers that be’. It was a charge that carried real punch in the atmosphere of the Cold War. The deprecation of the Riders’ motives and efficacy was not just a Southern conceit. New York-based Westbrook Pegler, the country’s leading conservative ...”

“... of Richard’s rule was its self-conscious quality. Other kings had sought to portray their powers and authority in impressive terms but Richard created for himself a new image of kingship, distanced from the criticism of his subjects by an aura of liturgical solemnity. Portraits displayed the King in iconic, Christ-like isolation; Richard encouraged a ...”

“... Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his ...”

“... interest only, can be seen from the very recent enactment of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. This controversial Act provides for a whole series of powers aimed broadly at covert surveillance. The measure is awash with Orwellian functionaries – the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, the Assistant ...”

“... full of junk and old gadgetry floating through time, dead appliances that still hinted at their powers of improvement. I felt she was keeping them for a happier domestic life in the next world, or for the past to return in this one, shaking us out of our need for better radios.She called one day to ask me to stop sending nice pictures of my holidays to her ...”

“... as group biography, since the principals have to share top billing with Mrs Inchbald, Sheridan, Thomas Lawrence and Mrs Jordan. There is a curious line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly mentions these lives in her ...”

“... vast majority.In the early 17th century Portuguese and Dutch merchants changed all that. European powers were eager to tap into lucrative Asian trade routes, seeking spices, textiles, precious stones and other valuable commodities. Like its competitors, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC), founded in 1602, used strategic ...”

“... a similar dynamic in Johnson’s sometimes disturbingly fierce reactions to the ‘seductive powers of eloquence’ and ‘overpowering pleasure’ of poetry. Documenting those responses while seeking to reframe them in general terms, Johnson creates what Lonsdale called a ‘quasi-erotic drama’ within which the male reader’s susceptibility to ...”

“... monstrous aberration, England’s sole experience of open military rule since the Conquest. Their powers, David Hume ruled, were exercised ‘not in the legal manner of European nations, but according to the maxims of eastern tyranny’. Nineteenth-century Whiggish historians queued to condemn that ‘despotism’. That the sword reigned in Cromwellian ...”

“... representational skill and – in England at least – the most marketable. It was a gift which Thomas Gainsborough showed early; in one account, so impressing a friend of his mother’s when he was still a boy that his father was persuaded he should go to London for instruction. But this talent wasn’t necessarily combined with other painterly ...”

“... most ancient form of jury in English history – the jury of inquest – was shorn of effective powers. And in a sweeping series of clauses, the option of trial by jury – or, in the old language, ‘putting oneself on one’s country’ – was removed in many categories of case where the option had previously been open. Such cases, which include many ...”

“... a terrifyingly deformed portrait can be consigned to the attic, so can the diarist exert all his powers of literary subterfuge to hide the truth from his reader and from himself. The chronicle begins in 1897 when Arthur Benson was 35 and a housemaster at Eton, and continues to his death as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1925, at the age of 63. He ...”

“... and Southey’s attempts to found a Utopian community in Pennsylvania, the political career of Thomas Jefferson’s Vice-President Aaron Burr, Southey’s own epic Madoc, the entire history of Western philosophy – but the poem’s bewildering imaginative scope and range of reference are continually focused by Muldoon’s insistence on the multiple ...”

“... So it’s pretty clear who the author has in mind when he equips his characters with uncanny powers of cultural precognition. Gibson’s career as a zeitgeist-wrangler got off to an impressive start when his science fiction novels – starting with Neuromancer (1984) – hammered out some sturdy templates for pop-cultural dystopianism. Ridley Scott’s ...”