“... The cycle, ‘Give Me Back My Rags’, personifies the unknown joker and attempts to exorcise his power. The speaker of the poem refuses to play the game: Damn your root and blood and crown And everything in life The thirsty pictures in your brain The fire-eyes on your fingertips And every every step To three cauldrons of cross-grained water Three ...”

“... the Lacan circus had had to migrate across town, from its original medical setting in the Sainte-Anne hospital, via the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the Rue d’Ulm, to a lecture-room lent by the law faculty of the Sorbonne; and Lacan the determined misfit has an amused commentary to offer on the reasons for these enforced displacements. At Sainte-...”

“... she’s a spy; others that she’s getting special treatment ‘per omertà di classe’ (which Anne Milano Appel translates as ‘because of class solidarity’, but might have been better left as ‘omertà’): ‘She’s hardly a worker like us.’ Stung by the accusations, Lucia decides to eat in the canteen with the Russians and Poles, to prove ...”

“... in Belgium, to be treated for alcoholism. Reilly began a relationship with a woman called Anne (surname unknown, possibly a colleague). He left Port Arthur at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Anne may have gone with him (they may even have got married) but she soon drops out of view and he’s making ...”

“... Moscow, Peking and Buckingham Palace. And they would finally catch me in the act.’ ‘No, when power is exaggerated … it ends up being reduced to nothing: to use it is too risky.’ He decides he is not going to tell his editor anything about it. Buzzati was born in northern Italy in 1906. He was a painter and poet as well as a journalist and fiction ...”

“... it met a mood, in Peru itself and beyond. In Peru, a reforming military government had been in power between 1968 and 1975 (it continued, some-what weakened, until 1980). At the height of its zeal, this junta was issuing more than a thousand edicts a day. (In the Peruvian Administration, as one member of it said to de Soto, there is still no time to ...”

“... Council. The council’s authority shouldn’t be exaggerated. The Privy Council exercised real power, but the power depended on royal prerogative. The king appointed and dismissed these officers at will, was under no legal obligation to seek the council’s advice or to follow it, and the council itself had no powers ...”

“... the Near East: ‘Defeat goes deeper into the human soul than victory. To be in someone else’s power is a conscious experience which induces doubts about the ordering of the universe.’ Hourani’s hopes for an independent, united and harmonious Lebanon were similarly let down when the civil war broke out in 1975. Many Arabs of Hourani’s generation have ...”

“... Anne Applebaum’s book begins with one group of women in the Polish city of Lodz and ends with another. The 45 years between the end of the Second World War and the emergence of a free, non-communist Poland separate them. But the younger women have decided to start again at the point where their elders left off – and to avoid their mistakes ...”

“... to the paintings of Ad Reinhardt, Rothko and Matisse. At the same time, the catalogue stresses power and money: ‘To acquire an Armani suit has become a right [sic] of passage, a symbol of success sought or won.’ Judith Thurman, who reviewed the show for the New Yorker, thinks, however, that Armani is passé and that the exhibition denotes his ...”

“... way or another. Ioannis Metaxas was a Parliamentary failure in Greece before being parachuted into power at the whim of an authoritarian monarch, while only the Second World War and a German invasion rescued the Croatian Fascist Ante Pavelic from the monotony of exile and enabled him to attain power in Zagreb. Vidkun ...”

“... Helen Vendler has the power to steal poets and enslave them in her personal canon. For this she is squeezed between rival condescensions: theorists pity her comprehensibility, while in creative writing departments poets denounce her ‘tyranny’, her ‘narrow aesthetic’, her ‘conservatism’. That both writers and academics complain about her is testament to her influence and gentle longevity – she is the most powerful poetry critic in America since Randall Jarrell ...”

“... This is an unambiguous rejection of the view widely held by Ukrainians and reflected inter alia in Anne Applebaum’s recent account of famine in the Ukraine. In Kotkin’s view, Stalin’s actions ‘do not indicate that he was trying to exterminate peasants or ethnic Ukrainians … There was no “Ukrainian” famine; the famine was Soviet.’ Kazakhs in ...”

“... Scotland and England which her son James VI and I would attempt and her great-great-granddaughter Anne (assisted by that parcel of rogues) would finally achieve. If the 16-year-old Mary hadn’t prematurely tried to invent the United Kingdom by having herself proclaimed in Paris as rightful ‘Queen of Scotland, England and Ireland’ within days of ...”

“... For his half-niece Anne Wharton, writing immediately after his death in 1680 at the age of 33, the poet Rochester was the guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: He civilised the rude and taught the young, Made fools grow wise, such artful music hung Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue. Rochester’s modern editors and biographers are well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes ...”