“... homestead’; ‘Paris had been a bust’; ‘Rilke knew he was headed for a showdown with his own powers of inspiration.’ We hear about the suicide of an uncle, ‘whom the child Rilke loved well, because he could not bear being still a captain at 51’. That sounds like Rilke, even if he sounds like a child of 51, but I think the ‘because’ must refer ...”

“... a military man, thinks: ‘this is the greatest danger, this point . . . where, in resisting the powers that form us, we allow them to gain control of all meaning; this is their moment of victory: it is in this way that they inflict their final and most terrible defeat.’ This is not the whole story, of course. There are less contaminated creatures of ...”

“... journal that has only now been printed, Ferenczi’s pupil and friend, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Michael Balint, said, with some indignation, that Jones’s volume contained ‘a violent attack on Ferenczi. As Jones had access to the whole Freud-Ferenczi correspondence, I could not understand how he was able to neglect the evidence contained in it. When I ...”

“... served by our own most recent literary hoax. I have before me a press hand-out from the firm of Michael Joseph: WE BELIEVE THAT NEVER BEFORE HAS A CELEBRATED WRITER OF FICTION SO SUCCESSFULLY DISGUISED HER IDENTITY AND CREATED SUCH AN EXPERIMENT IN PUBLISHING AND NEVER BEFORE HAS A WRITER AT THE HEIGHT OF HER ...”

“... the Elder struck political gold during the 1988 Presidential campaign by castigating his opponent, Michael Dukakis, as a liberal, virtually no American politician will voluntarily accept the label. One unlikely exception is Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s new billionaire Republican Mayor, who during the campaign ...”

“... not immediately comprehensible. Perhaps it is part of Mr Arden’s conspiracy theory of the powers which rule the state that everybody has a nickname and nobody tells the truth; lack of information is veiled as a series of tip-offs. The style puts one in mind of a violently updated prose paraphrase of Sordello, as perhaps this passage might ...”

“... began the countdown to the November re-election date. This campaign gathered such momentum that Michael Heseltine, the obvious contender, would have been badly damaged had he not stood. In June this year the same countdown had begun when Major cut the campaign short with a pre-emptive resignation, his calculation presumably being that the requirement of ...”

“... man-of-letters fustian run alongside intellectual strenuousness and extraordinary powers of explanation and illumination. It is sad to realise that his is no longer a (middle-class) household name. This popularising suggests in flickers what his more formal essays, decidedly not written for the general music-lover, achieve with mastery: an ...”

“... a vivid picture of the man whose character and career epitomise the post-war triumphs of MI5: Michael Bettaney. Poor Bettaney was off his rocker from an early age. Though he was clever enough to go to Oxford University, he could not contain his twin obsessions: Adolf Hitler and alcohol. Observers in Oxford pubs would ask him to be quiet when he clicked ...”

“... accident, but must involve fate or providence, which may in turn require the presence of numinous powers. W.B. Yeats could see nothing tragic about a car crash. Pure contingency – falling drunkenly from a fifth-floor window, for example – lacks the grandeur of the tragic. The protagonist must be of high social rank, partly because the lives of ordinary ...”

“... The ‘posture of War’ has driven incipient and established states alike to increase their powers, extend their competencies, centralise their operations, deepen their penetration of social life, and enlarge and rationalise their apparatuses of taxation, adjudication, regulation and surveillance. Refined in the crucible of war, the ...”

“... behaviour of the social workers and doctors comes down to this: how should they have used their powers in dealing with the children and parents they saw, given the knowledge that sexual abuse of children, sometimes very brutal, does occur? For example, the father of three young girls diagnosed as showing signs consistent with sexual abuse complained to the ...”

“... England faced an uncertain future on the margins of a Europe now dominated by the great powers.’ In what sense was England already ‘post-imperial’ by 1523, one wonders? And ‘gone for ever’? For ever is a long time, and if England was in some sense ‘shrunken’ in 1523, and is again shrunken and even marginalised in 1998, it might be ...”

“... another age. In the era of the World Wide Web, books and newspapers are often dismissed as waning powers. But across much of Africa the certainty persists that writing can make things happen. Saro-Wiwa was a voluminous, protean writer who pitched his ambitions high. In one of his final letters from detention, he assured his friend, the novelist William ...”

“... image of Hogg and the bell did as much damage to his career as seizing the Speaker’s mace did to Michael Heseltine’s. Noting in his diary that Hogg was ‘really not safe’, that he was ‘in a very over-excited condition and keeps giving ridiculous “press conferences”’, Macmillan dropped him as Party Chairman. Since it wasn’t possible to make him ...”