“... human beings must be fully describable in terms of material components. Porter shows the initial power of strong Hobbist materialism (together with the dismay it provoked in pious breasts) and then, as problems multiplied, the shift from physiology to psychology, followed by a convulsive shift to idealism, as we reach the great English Romantics, Blake and ...”

“... emergence of today’s Republican Party during the 1850s as an open adversary of Southern ‘Slave Power’ and the advent of the Civil War in 1861 shattered this second party system, and ushered in the seemingly familiar conflict of Democrats and Republicans. In the 1890s, tensions between agrarian and industrial interests enshrined a new set of meanings in ...”

“... obsessive attentions, room to breathe and speak. After a stay at Rydal Mount in 1816, Henry Crabb Robinson told Mary Lamb that ‘he never saw a man so happy in three wives as Mr Wordsworth is’ and it has proved easy to think of the self-important poet attended by these slavishly admiring females. Barker’s picture of the household is ...”

“... attack. ‘He’s either a great fraud or a genius,’ Clare Boothe Luce reported to her husband Henry, owner of Time magazine. ‘Probably both.’ Hearing his plans, Admiral Thomas Hart, commander of the grandly-named US Asiatic Fleet, wrote to his wife: ‘Douglas is, I think, no longer altogether sane ... he may not have been for a long time.’ When ...”

“... victory in 1979 and Robert Mugabe’s in 1980. Thirty-six years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be seven thousand millionaires while four million people in the capital survive on $2 a day. Poverty is even more ...”

“... dragged by a restless father from city to city, from hotel to rented quarters. As with William and Henry James, this life apart from their peers would be the making of Borges as an artist, but it would mean that his life, when he returned to Argentina, would be more complicated. Once more, school was a nightmare since he did not speak the same language as his ...”

“... troubling when Hardwick is writing about real people. For Plath, ‘suicide is an assertion of power, of the strength – not the weakness – of the personality. She is no poor animal sneaking away, giving up; instead she is strong, threatening, dangerous.’ Nor is Hardwick afraid to pit Plath’s suicide against that of another female writer: ‘When ...”

“... to rival that of Sylvia Plath as a subject for infinite fascination. It is vital to remember the power these poems had before the details of the poet’s life became public. Some letters are missing. Most of Bishop’s letters to Lota Costellat de Macedo Soares were destroyed, as were her letters to Marjorie Carr Stevens, with whom she lived in Key West in ...”

“... Arrow. The gimmick of the earlier book, telling a life story in strict reverse order, had a huge power which included the power to numb. House of Meetings doesn’t have a gimmick, and any historical-revisionist agenda is swallowed up in the task of writing something analogous to the novel about the Soviet era that Nabokov ...”

“... he disliked extravagance, and perhaps he felt, too, that the seductive, clotted usages of power could pitch us off balance if we looked at them too hard. Were that the end of the story, it would make George Oppen a minor left-wing relic, which is far from the case. Quite a while before his death in 1984, he won a keen following in the United ...”

“... On 23 January 1894, Henry James entered in his notebook two stories told to him by Lady Gregory, whom he had met first in Rome 15 years earlier. She had given one of them to him, he wrote, as a plot, and ‘saw more in it than, I confess, I do myself’. ‘At any rate,’ he went on, ‘Lady G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue ...”

“... works on her nails. Here, in this very peaceful sunlit square, you are in the historical centre of power of Arles, ecclesiastical and civic; the archbishop’s palace is also in front of you, with, out of your view, its courtyard where the lion of Arles was once kept. Then, when at last you leave the bench, taking care to say goodbye to the older woman, who ...”

“... the welfare state was a worthwhile project, but more acutely by visual excitement at the excessive power, ruggedness and exoticism of buildings like this’. Brutalist architects, he says, were used to give a ‘radical’ face to the constants of British ruling class life: Oxbridge, the Royal College of Physicians and the RIBA, Whitehall, and of course ...”

“... cruel.’‘The matter of your work is yours entirely and I don’t think you have it in your power to “hurt” me,’ Hardwick herself told Lowell. ‘I mean that I cannot see what harm can come to me from a poem by you. Why should I care?’ It seemed, however, that she did care. Bidart – who had answered Lowell’s call for help and spent time with ...”

“... be more popular than any president he served under, or any politician who might have checked his power in Congress. He was said to have transformed the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the free world’s greatest bulwark against the ‘anarchy and lawlessness and immorality that passes imagination’. He warned his countrymen that the ...”