“... he had been sent to sow doubts about the preacher’s promised indulgences. But Theobald, by the power of the cross, commanded the demon to preach in his stead and even placed his stole around the woman’s neck. Though unwillingly, Abrianus preached with such power that eight hundred men came forward to take the cross. We ...”

“... as will be obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to compare this book with J.T. Noonan’s Power to Dissolve (1972), a major study of lawyers and marriage cases in the Roman curia which analyses the impact of the canon law system on the individual through a close reading of six cases spread over the period 1653-1923. Most surprising of all, the general ...”

“... old age don’t have. Just a question, but what if Sylvia Plath were alive and well, along with Anne Sexton, and the two of them met over occasional lunches to tut-tut over the sloppy rearing of their grandchildren? Death, in any case, has a cachet which lends weight to even the featheriest of lives. A cynic might suppose that Lyndall Gordon was fortunate ...”

“... English Civil War (not the course of events in the 1640s), the role of party in the time of Queen Anne (not the chronology of her reign), the reasons for the failure of the 1848 Revolutions (not the actual course of the revolutions). History is by its nature a critical, sceptical discipline. Historians commonly see one of their main tasks as puncturing ...”

“... cried when they fell out of favour. ‘Did she weep? You are sure? You saw her tears?’ A nasty, power-hungry piece of work? Well no, not if you really knew him, Erdal says. ‘There was no harm intended. It was simply an entertainment for him.’ Quite. Squat-necked Scot Erdal may have been, but she was not, she makes it clear, one of his girls. She was ...”

“... behave like a child, as Lacey reveals in a story about a letter she sent anonymously to Princess Anne, lying about it afterwards. After the war everything changed. Fed up with arguing cases that enabled rich people to pay less tax, Hart decided to return to the academy, and at the age of 38, with only an undergraduate degree in the subject, took up a post as ...”

“... in favour of his son Philip and brother Ferdinand. It was abundantly clear why such a transfer of power was necessary. It was a cold winter and Charles, white-haired, with shrunken gums exposing blackened teeth, his joints so crippled by gout that he was unable to sign documents with his bandaged hands, was exhausted, infirm and, in his ...”

“... during the ferocious cold of February 1947, when coal shortages meant going without heat, and power was cut for hours each day. The great London smog of December 1952 choked bankers and paupers alike (it brought a performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells to a close because no one could see the stage). In the years immediately after the ...”

“... them. As he hadn’t there was something sinful about music lessons.’ Much of the early part of Anne Sebba’s new biography concerns Ethel’s love of Yiddish theatre and her own theatrical ambitions. She was named ‘class actress’ in a high school that produced Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz), Zero Mostel and Walter Matthau. But she was lopsided ...”

“... is not exactly young. He has become less decisive. Those who have never known limitations on their power find it hard to cope when their bodies start to let them down. When the emperor takes a nap, it isn’t as a concession to middle age but an aspect of his ceremonial duties: ‘The silence his nap demanded was imperial. Nothing moved in the palace between ...”

“... of Green and Orange politics.’ Although liberalisation is limited and the Stormont version of power-sharing has reinforced the Balkanisation of communities, changes long underway in the Republic have been advancing across the North.The mass of scholarship published in Irish Studies since the start of the pandemic shows related shifts. Work is still being ...”

“... conceptual depth of the ancient belief in the supremacy of Word over Image. The Word was God. The power of Reformation in England was in part a result of Henry’s obsession with a male heir, as well as his prudent sense of how much might be gained by a takeover dissolution of the Roman Church’s more corrupt interests. But the movement as a whole still ...”

“... cast the United States as uniquely virtuous’, but having Trump in the ‘cockpit of American power’ will reveal ‘just how terrifyingly normal a nation we are, with our populist jingoism and hawkish foreign policy’. The bipartisan support for the president’s bombing campaigns shows that little has changed in this respect, however. As Trump ordered ...”

“... black eyes, as impenetrable as those of a cobra. There was a generous curve to the big nose and power in the square lines of the vast jaw.’ Not even an anti-semite like Christie would risk such a passage today. In the same book, she introduces a ‘Herzoslovakian’ peasant, Boris Anchoukoff, with ‘high Slavonic cheekbones, and dreamy fanatic ...”

“... the idea of universal human rights with the greatest vigour in the 1940s. But when New Labour took power in 1997, with its talk of human rights and ethical foreign policy, its future role as a quasi-colonial power was somehow not anticipated. Equally unanticipated was the long reach of Article 3, with its prohibition of ...”