“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was dead and that he had killed her, he was immediately rushed to the mental hospital of Saint-Anne in order that he should escape being arrested and interrogated by the police. Such allegations are only to be expected when an eminent Communist is involved: newspapers are always eager to show that there is no sense of equality or justice among ...”

“... with the reek of disinfectant and urine from ‘the bogs’. Perhaps Bailey’s exceptional power of recall has to do with the contrast which even then he could draw with a very different way of life. In September 1940, at the age of seven, he had been evacuated to the USA and had spent four years with a prosperous family in Dayton, Ohio. When he got ...”

“... sense of fate associated with it, or the knowledge that reality was such as to demand unfathomable power of will against impossible odds. It is always important to recall this early phase of Gramsci’s astonishing biography. He is the greatest of Western Marxists. But it cannot be without some significance that he was also a product of the West’s most ...”

“... gradual descent of Churchill into old age, in parallel with the running down of Britain as a great power. But the starting-point is different, and so is the perspective. Moran did not get to know Churchill until the middle of the war, and saw most of him when he was ill. But Colville witnessed Churchill’s finest hour, one of the most inspired performances of ...”

“... but is convinced that he failed to achieve the goal of his self-construction, ‘a place in the power structure’. She is fine on his medical self-education, visible through his continuing elaboration and commentary on a 15th-century medical textbook: a progress in learning and skill which gave substance to his practice and to his writings about ...”