“... that you just don’t get out enough. The Balkan hole-plugging exercise carried out by the US was power-play thinly disguised as moralism. Some truisms can’t be reiterated often enough, and we have anarchists like Noam Chomsky to thank for one of them: when the powerful talk of ‘liberation’, you can be sure that somewhere, in a state near ...”

“... in such generous quantities. For all its sensationalism, the writing of Ellen Wood (or Mrs Henry Wood, as she preferred to call herself) is unremittingly moral in tone. The characters are constantly held up to judgment, human and divine. Isabel’s repentant demise is followed by a final chapter of explicit moral directive – ‘never forget that the ...”

“... 1675. But when she bore him a daughter, the fact had to be reported to Rochester by his friend Henry Savile, who added: ‘I doubt she does not lie in in much state, for a friend and protectress of hers in the Mall was much lamenting her poverty very lately, not without some gentle reflexions on your lordship’s want either of generosity or of bowels ...”

“... by Barbara Walters. The ‘humanitarian’ award goes to Diana Spencer and will be presented by Henry Kissinger. In other words, a single well-placed grenade could remove the whole beating heart of the international celebrity industry, along with its most servile and deferential interviewer and promoter: Barbara Walters, doyenne of drool and sultana of ...”

“... to 1909, has not exactly been neglected, but Nathan Miller’s 1992 biography was the first since Henry Pringle’s in 1931. Edmund Morris won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, a bestseller despite its 863 pages, and now he gives us the Presidential years in a svelte, eminently readable 772 pages. Some critics (mostly ...”

“... conspirators are not Jews but Jesuits. The Protocols was taken up by Tsar Nicholas II, Hitler and Henry Ford, who in the 1920s had half a million copies of it printed, even though it had been conclusively shown to be an anti-semitic fraud in 1921. There is a striking paradox here: as in most racist conspiracy theories, the people accused of possessing ...”

“... vividly metaphorical to the point of drama, in which to speak of both love and art in terms of the power they both yield. From first to last, the Master (both Maestro and tyrant) is the Duke himself: ‘That’s my ... for me.’ But while we read, we cannot usefully distinguish between Browning’s voice and the Duke’s – between the authority of the ...”

“... we push a button, ‘something magical begins’. The magic, needless to say, belongs mostly to power. Inoculation by push-button has consistently reinforced the class distinction between those who own or manipulate information and those who have little to dispose of other than their energy. Plotnick’s instructive term for the capacity created in this way ...”

“... of the three hundred Spartans commemorated in Simonides’ epigram on Thermopylae. For Sir Henry Newbolt there is no difference between the words of the school cricket captain with ‘Ten to make and the match to win’ and those of the schoolboy rallying the ranks when ‘the Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead.’ At the beginning of the First ...”

“... In her first public writing after her elopement with George Henry Lewes in 1854, George Eliot compared the position of women in England and in France: ‘in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred.’ And, writing under cover of anonymity for the Westminster Review, she declared that one reason for the achievement of women in France is ‘laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the marriage-tie ...”

“... and exalt hierarchy through ‘a well-ordered public space and beneficent, universal public power’. These ideas had their origins in absolutism; they resurfaced in different forms in the social republicanism of the French Revolution and, especially, in the authoritarianism of Bismarck’s Germany. At present, the trend is away from the baroque ...”

“... Patrick Cockburn writes that Claud ‘disbelieved strongly in the axiom about “telling truth to power”, knowing that the rulers of the earth have no wish to hear any such thing. Much more effective, he believed, is to tell truth to the powerless so they have a fighting chance in any struggle against the big battalions.’ But the story of Claud Cockburn ...”

“... to write memoirs; most of them probably feel that there are always more useful things to be done. Henry Ferns deviated from socialism long ago, but became a distinguished historian. His book, both entertaining and informative, looks back over a lifetime of abrupt, unforeseeable changes of outlook. Then there have been three books concerned with another ...”

“... him, Hersh writes, but he remained frustrated by the paper’s ambivalence towards established power. By the summer of 1972, Hersh had uncovered three controversial projects inside the CIA: the ‘frantic’ manoeuvrings to undermine the Allende government in Chile; an expensive project to recover a downed Soviet submarine; and Operation Chaos, the ...”

“... carpet tacks and cigarette ends; it was not just her audience who swallowed rubbish. Her husband, Henry Duncan, was a Dundee boy who enlisted at 16. His very poor family had a history of hauntings, and Henry seems to have been superstitious, sensitive and intelligent. Later, he would become the theroretician, while Helen ...”