“... drawing and pastel lessons from her father, the society portraitist Louis Vigée; her contemporary Anne-Rosalie Bocquet, who died on the guillotine during the Terror, studied at a drawing school run by her mother. In later decades, however, progressively smaller numbers of Parisian female exhibitors came from artistic households. The majority received ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he is able to publicise the theory that Kingsley possesses a magical healing touch – like the power presumed by Queen Anne when she touched for the King’s Evil. The general public, of course, would not believe in such magical power stemming from the royal house of the Stuarts: but ...”

“... Rhymes of Childhood in 1890.) It contains, as well, an implicit threat – the orphan’s sinister power: An orphan’s curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high. Orphans can cast the evil eye on us; their bad luck may be communicable. But what Riley was primarily saying was then considered perfectly acceptable: the poor and unfortunate were put here by ...”

“... enjoying an agreeable intimacy with the formidable Leslie Stephen and his charming sister-in-law, Anne Thackeray. In 1874, when Far from the Madding Crowd came out, he became famous, and shortly afterwards was hobnobbing with most of the intellectual leaders of the day, and a surpringly large number of the social notabilities as well. But Hardy, who had a ...”

“... need to exploit them: ‘Many of the so-called differences are disguises for whatever a dominant power can impose.’ (Let me set the authors a good example of restrained and responsible hermeneutics by stating that I think it more likely that their index’s misidentification of ‘the adolescent Freud’ who, on page 156, climbs up a tree screaming, after ...”

“... husbands. At the same time, such ‘good’ and ‘feminine’ women would eschew any turn towards power, authority or control for themselves. Women thus could be got to police themselves out of any desire to compete with men for the higher kinds of job, as out of any will to take legislative or other control of their lives and fortunes, and the lives and ...”

“... in Asia and Africa, it was impossible to square its emphatic voluntarism with the idea that global power structures trapped colonised peoples in relations of dependency. Smiles was impatient with structures. ‘It may be of comparatively little consequence how a man is governed from without,’ he wrote, because ‘everything depends upon how he governs ...”

“... February 1615 aboard the East India Company’s new ship the Lion, and returned, in command of the Anne Royal, to the Downs in September 1619. He had previously held a household position under Elizabeth I; travelled from La Coruña to Valladolid as part of the delegation sent by James VI and I to ratify an Anglo-Spanish alliance in 1605; commanded an ...”

“... independent judiciary. It was the critical episode in the transformation of Britain from a minor power with a dynastic foreign policy to a major one with an imperial destiny. It laid the foundations of the constitutional practices which would be exported round the world. In Scotland it overthrew the Episcopalian state church and led to the Act of Union. In ...”

“... must have tasted victory in this Whig civic pageant. Crusoe’s occasional moments of exhilarating power and authority – feeling that he is ‘prince and lord of the whole island’ – reflect Defoe’s sense of liberation and his intimacy with state power, first acquired in William’s reign. Crusoe is particularly ...”

“... of all the oppressed’ and a liberal tradition of 19th century British missionary culture. Jo-Anne Collinge, a journalist on the Johannesburg Weekly Mail, has criticised the book for ‘the blandness which results from faithfulness to the idea of letting participants tell the story’. This is a polite way of saying that the author has failed to provide a ...”

“... declared that one of his key goals was ‘to establish German film as the dominant cultural world power’. He came very close to succeeding. Within a few weeks of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, his newly created propaganda ministry set to work. During his first year in office, he founded the Reich Film Chamber, which ...”

“... palace. Even before he has taken up occupation his children are being seeded into positions of power. There he is on television, shiny and golden, his wife beside him and three of his children lined up behind, ready to take up what daddy has to offer. Here he is back on Twitter, unshackled by victory, rounding on his opponents in the free press. His ...”