“... on to describe Shakespeare’s Dream as, in effect, performing a function analogous to that of Robert Bly’s ‘men’s movement’: the male anxieties revealed by Foreman and de Maisse about being ruled by this dubiously sexy old woman are imaginatively soothed through the conquest of the Amazon queen, Hippolyta, and ...”

“... that year’s controversy over parliamentary reform. His essay had attacked anti-democrats such as Robert Lowe for using historical analogies from ancient Greece to justify their opposition to franchise extension, since the social and political circumstances of modern Britain were entirely different. Compared to Lowe, Bryce’s instincts were democratic, but ...”

“... thin sociability and inner anaesthesia. ‘These are the tranquillised Fifties and I am forty,’ Robert Lowell wrote in 1958. Thiebaud sniffed the air of lost connections, but he held onto the moment when we all wanted the same things, sensing how fragile it would turn out to be.It is often said that his paint seems to partake of the same materials as its ...”

“... But alongside Sándor Petőfi, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Taras Shevchenko, Mihai Eminescu or Robert Burns, Shakespeare barely looks like a national poet at all, unlike Byron, as Dović and Helgason point out, whose engagement with liberal politics and eventual death in the cause of national liberation (even if it was the liberation of Greece rather than ...”

“... bread’). The claims of the Palestinians on the land they had lost were based only on ‘right of conquest’, she tells the head of a Muslim women’s association – and that was ‘in the seventh century’: The Jews got here first, about two thousand years ahead of you. You haven’t lived as masters in your own house for a long time. Aside from the ...”

“... leading 20th-century cultural historian of Russia’, is cited – and the period of the Mongol conquest is generally blamed for having cut Russia off from European cultural developments. Nonetheless, there has always been a certain ambiguity in the Asia connection; ‘Asiatic’ was how European observers such as the Marquis de Custine characterised the ...”

“... have been – or would have been, if they’d known the full extent of the atrocities – by the conquest of Ethiopia, but Sciascia was in no doubt as to which side he supported in the Spanish Civil War, and it wasn’t the side that Mussolini sent thousands of ‘volunteers’ to fight on. After Italy entered the Second World War, Sciascia was conscripted ...”

“... go back a long way. Full-blown feudalism was imposed in one fell swoop from above, by a Norman conquest that left a medieval monarchy structurally always more powerful than its Capetian rival, which slowly and painfully extended its reach, by piecemeal assemblage, beyond the Isle-de-France. Capitalism, in turn, arrived much earlier, in good measure because ...”

“... wit and humour to protect itself against the failure of its search; and what the art critic Robert Hughes calls (in a different context) a ‘prophylactic irony’ to obscure the poet’s exact attitude to his statements, making his own uncertainty itself uncertain. Such games, and indeed such rigours, are quite unnecessary to a work like Omeros whose ...”

“... militarise Germany, annihilate the neighbouring countries to south and east, and embark on a conquest of the world. Taylor saw something different – still evil, but not in the Hollywood sense that was apparently required. A year or two before, he had written a Bismarck that also clashed with customary opinion: Bismarck turned out to be a man who ...”

“... Baku was more than 1100 miles from Kabul. British military strategists did not fear the Russian conquest of India – the army officer George de Lacy Evans half-admitted as much in On the Designs of Russia (1828), Russophobia’s foundational text. His concern was that increasing Russian activity beyond India’s borders would ‘disturb and disaffect the ...”

“... short-suffering Mosley with his other help-meet Diana Guinness née Mitford. Mosley’s biographer Robert Skidelsky avers that ‘Mosley always tried to maintain the old English distinction between private life and public life.’ But Mosley came up against that other, even more powerful, old English tradition or law which has recently snuffed out ...”

“... emperor, throne, rebel, authority, bestowal of preferments, prerogative) as well as of military conquest (a traditional source of metaphors in transactions between the sexes, also touched on in a new book by Robert Erickson) in their exercises or boasts of sexual tyranny, in ways which sometimes go beyond the idiomatic or ...”

“... carted off by an English king in an act of plunder which was also intended to be a symbolic act of conquest. Not the Stone, but the presence of the Stone at Westminster served to define one of the underlying realities of the English-Scottish relationship, and it continued to do so even after the 1707 Treaty of Union fused the two kingdoms into one ‘Great ...”

“... greatest womaniser was hiding something. ‘Byron liked the chase, the reassurance of heterosexual conquest.’ Yet she is sure that his ‘relations with boys’ were his true ‘emotional focus’. It was not just a phase. ‘Byron’s male loves seem to have deepened and flourished with the years.’ She is convinced that, in romantic recollection, he ...”