“... rewriting the history of the Bolshevik underground in Baku, and brooding on the ‘technology of power’: ‘A state apparatus that is a reliable executor of the supreme will must be kept in a state of fear. That fear will then be passed on to the people.’ Oderint dum metuant, in other words. The novel ends with the assassination in December 1934 of the ...”

“... social fabric that holds Britain’s cities together is fraying. New technologies of transport and power become slings for catapulting homes and industry clear of the tangled inner city. Reinforced by an improvident structure of taxation, these forces conspire to undermine civic leadership and create the moral vacuum familiar at the core of today’s ...”

“... evidence that he claimed to have at his command; and also that only Cromwell’s sudden fall from power and departure from this world made possible the legacy which Elton spent a lifetime exploiting. None of this is in the least biographical. But now Robert Hutchinson rushes in where Elton chose not to tread. His is the first biography of Cromwell since ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... this white rose with Plantagenet.It was another two hundred years before Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein, published in 1829, brought the idea of the ‘wars of the White and Red Roses’ into common usage. Since then it has become synonymous with the political turmoil which, between 1455 and 1485, saw four English kings deposed (one of them ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but with a corporatist organisation that would soothe class conflicts and rid society of Jewish power. The word Antisemitismus had been coined by a German radical, Wilhelm Marr, in 1879, and arguably the first modern pogrom had taken place in Ukraine in 1881. But the new strand of thought gained ideological prominence with Édouard Drumont’s bestselling ...”

“... Meyers, having secured the story for himself thanks to the co-operation of Morrison’s daughter Anne, has allowed it to skew his biography. Many of his pages read like newspaper précis of the plots of soap operas. Anne Morrison, he writes, still bitter about some aspects of her childhood, feels Kay hurt other people ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”