“... 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 ...”

“... life, much of it previously hidden. ‘Access to privacy,’ she notes, ‘was an index of power.’ Her examining of records from the Old Bailey brings to light the formerly blanked-out domestic detail of rough lodging houses and servants’ quarters. The testimonies offered in cases of breaking and entering tell of scant furnishings and pathetic ...”

“... RA, ‘but true art needs no incentive; its work is its own reward.’ Annie Swynnerton was born Anne Louisa Robinson in Manchester in 1844, one of the four daughters of a legal clerk and his wife. She went to Manchester Art School in 1871, as did her sisters Emily and Julia, where they were all prize-winning students, though frustrated by the scope of the ...”

“... found their original purpose in exclusive cults much like the hallucinogens that he discusses. C. Anne Wilson has traced the strong connections between alchemy, distillation and cultic initiation in her paper ‘Philosophers, Iosis and the Water of Life’, dating the development of wine-distillation to no later than Anaxilos of Larissa (c.40 BC) and placing ...”

“... the conversation, of which, in fact, there was little. By this time, anyway, Ehrenburg’s immense power to pull the strings of cultural life had devolved on his French-born secretary, Natalya Stolyarova. She had become the facilitator, the person to see for appointments, assurance that this or that coast was clear, permission to read this and that, and so ...”

“... fringes of the City of London, is an arresting motto: E Pulvere Lux Et Vis. The ‘light’ and ‘power’ were electrical; the ‘dust’ that was burned to generate them was the refuse from the surrounding streets. Twenty thousand tons of this fuel, most of it horse dung, was gathered locally every year. Incinerating waste and making electricity were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that we are bound by our social origins to what he calls aesthetic dispositions and have little power to choose otherwise.Denise is a perfect example of Bourdieu’s thesis. As she grows up, she becomes alienated from what Ernaux calls ‘the real’. Or rather, the real of her childhood disappears under the onslaught of the real of school, for which she ...”

“... for subplots worthy of Trollope or Dickens, usually hingeing on sex, class or institutional power, or sometimes all three at once. ‘I must say I do have a sneaking guilty hankering for dominant males myself,’ Cooper wrote in 1977, and nothing much seems to have changed since then as far as the main thrust of her fiction goes. The best-known figure ...”

“... as The Mad and the Bad, extended this sense of the world as a closed circle of violence and power. A young woman and a boy, Julie and Peter, attacked by mysterious assailants, have to run for their lives: a classic noir plot (a lover of jazz, Manchette likes to riff on the standards). He switches pace between scenes, speeding up the action until it’s ...”

“... now editor of the Scotsman, understood his talent and also knew the dangers. Francis avoided power, but he somehow had it anyway, Without, as Linklater put it, ‘lifting a finger’, he managed to subvert the sacrosanct rules of newspaper publishing. The Magazine’s reputation on the newspaper for being frivolous, self-absorbed, anarchic, using acres ...”

“... the thing we would prefer him not to do, and does it bravely. Fewer tears are shed by the women in Anne Sebba’s admirable book. ‘You can’t betray the strains you are under,’ says Patricia Clough of the Independent, and much of this book is about the pressures of operating in a world where men have liked to have one set of rules for themselves and ...”