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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... book, Elizabethan Life in Town and Country (1925), and editor of Henry VIII’s love letters to Anne Boleyn (1936), was beavering away, sorting, transcribing, annotating thousands of letters exchanged between Lord Lisle, his wife Honor, their agents in London, and leading members of the Henrician court and political circles. If it seemed that there was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... attachment to models was stronger than it was in the more pragmatic UK, Conquest’s first book, Power and Policy in the USSR (1961), ran into some criticism on these grounds. Thereafter, a tinge of mutual scepticism and condescension informed his relationship with academia, despite the coincidence of Cold War views between Conquest and most academic ...”

“... as an upper age limit for marital prospects in Pride and Prejudice; it is also the age at which Anne Elliot in Persuasion (1817) marries a former lover whose loss had seemed irrevocable. When Charlotte Lucas decides to accept Mr Collins, a man deemed insufferable by the younger, more rebellious Elizabeth Bennet, the narrator offers a series of crisp remarks ...”

“... Anne Barton​ delivered the lectures on ‘The Shakespearean Forest’ that form the basis for this, her much anticipated last book, in Cambridge in 2003. The Clark Lectures were themselves the product of an extended reflection on the significance of Shakespeare’s imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays ...”