“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... also opened his house to many others, bringing up several wards, one of whom was the 12-year-old Anne Cresacre, who for the sake of her inheritance had been abducted by a local magistrate and raped by his son; More gave her refuge, and in due course she married his son, John. As grandchildren arrived they too joined the household, and when his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he created the kingdom of Angria, and roped Charlotte into writing chronicles about it. Emily and Anne, distressed by the macho militarism of Branwell’s fables, created the more peaceable kingdom of Gondal in a separatist gesture. The hero of the Angrian myths is Alexander Percy, anarchist and aristocrat, a Branwell in everything but the dope, spinelessness ...”

“... on occasion (and occasionally is) since there is not the faintest doubt of its virility, its power (for as long or short as is desired) to capture and absorb its public. Television is not on the way to destroying fiction (which is what much of it is), it is only going to shove writing, ‘style’, a little further back into the darkness where, one ...”

“... that their bright colours represented ‘all the longings’ of ‘the colourless civilian man of power’. And it is true that the older style of masculinity seems to have been delegated to soldiers: they still killed, and still paraded, in colours. Yet it is powerful men, not dashing officers, that fictitious heroines find most sexually ...”

“... it ‘an unexpected, almost miraculous accord between abandon to the world and confidence in its power’. This phrase illuminates the role of ‘the world’ in the book’s title and the allusion to one of Satyajit Ray’s best-known films, The Home and the World. Daney is at his brilliant best when writing about Orson Welles, whose films ‘begin where ...”

“... a self-amplifying state bent on overcoming the rule of law and testing the limits of authoritarian power. The effect on many has been to induce a sense of disorientation and terror; they wonder when, or whether, it will stop. Some wave the orders away, stressing the difficulties of implementing them and affirming their faith that the courts will, in the ...”

“... herself, but his success came at a price: the nobility split into factions, provoking civil war. Power slipped into the hands of the nobles, whose alliances constantly shifted and who held the allegiance of the local retainers who provided the manpower for rival armies. York was killed at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460, but not before he’d marched into ...”

“... right-hand men. Among these lords were the Robertians, later known as the Capetians, whose power centred on Paris. Others included the counts of Flanders, Vermandois and Poitou, and the dukes of Aquitaine, Anjou, Burgundy and Normandy. All these families were connected by ties of marriage and bound by oaths of loyalty to the king, and their territories ...”

“... are laced with a sometimes murderous aggression. Almost all relationships in their world are power struggles, spiced from time to time with a sadistic delight in making others suffer and a masochistic drive to self-immolation. Charlotte’s Villette is full of such erotic perversities. Apart from Anne Brontë’s ...”

“... it put her next to someone with ‘a strong breath’. The chaplain to James I’s wife, Queen Anne, held that of ‘all the noisome scents, there is none so rammish and so intolerable as that which proceeds from man’s body … I will not speak of his filth issuing from his eares, his eyes, nostrils, mouth, navel, and the uncleane parts.’ Even Jacobean ...”