“... apart in age and came from different worlds. Burke was born in Dublin in 1729, the second son of Richard, a Protestant lawyer of ‘fretful temper’, and Mary, daughter of a Catholic family from County Cork. Richard Burke was a harsh and unforgiving father, and rumours about cradle Catholicism dogged Edmund throughout his ...”

“... as instruments for locking on; uncertainty makes arrests more likely. As the British legal scholar Richard Martin has pointed out, the police already had extensive powers for dealing with protesters, including on roads. The new measures, which Priti Patel claimed would prevent ‘eco-warriors trampling over our way of life ...”

“... achievement, combining the restless determination of Tschiffely’s Ride with a touch of Richard Jefferies or (among recent American naturalist-travellers) Edwin Way Teale. Moon uses a camera and a tape-recorder competently, but as aides-mémoire, not as mistresses. Between these covers are locked the perceptions of a reluctant solitary, perhaps, but ...”

“... Olive’s vision of Africa was pastoral and republican. On the other side were principalities and powers, the ‘wild dogs of gold’. ‘All my friends (liberals) from home write saying there cannot be war,’ she tells her brother in July 1899. ‘But for us there is a worse possibility than war, that of slowly falling into the hands of speculators.’ On 9 ...”

“... it, to discover beneath its apparent unity the actual, irreducible forces that comprise it. What Richard Rorty called the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, which was repealed subsequently in literary theory, was driven by the conviction that the only thing real in the subject was language, and that the only way for humanists to compete with scientists was ...”

“... through the war, though they were rather eclipsed in 1916 by John Buchan’s Greenmantle, in which Richard Hannay bluffed his way to Constantinople to prevent a wild Islamic prophet, backed by Germany, from setting the East in flames. In the real world the Germans were backing a more potent troublemaker by smuggling Lenin to St Petersburg, thus establishing ...”

“... inspectors and a local authority after lobbying from pornographer turned property developer Richard Desmond. Desmond saved £45 million in community infrastructure costs; he then made a £12,000 donation to the Conservative Party.)Perhaps we have become too inured to the behaviour of this government for its treatment of the mayor’s office to be the ...”

“... before seen in this country. At times, indeed, it was going up by a thousand a month, which, as Richard Tilt, the director general of the Prison Service, has pointed out, requires a new prison every three weeks to house the intake. If Howard’s Crime (Sentencing) Bill goes through Parliament, it will add between 10,000 and 30,000 prisoners to the present ...”

“... by a housewife. As a way of clearing her mind, a woman makes use of a weekend when her husband, Richard, is away, to set down on paper what has been happening over the previous months. Stella, a teenager, just out of high school, comes to stay as a guest of the family. Under the eyes of his wife, Richard seduces ...”

“... presumably responded to but can say little about Shakespeare’s young lovers. Romanticism both powers and silences her. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, when – sometime around 1950, where the section called by the editors ‘The Novelist’ begins (the journals are thin for half a dozen years before) – a page is turned and the new ...”

“... where human lives weren’t shaped by civilised self-acquaintance but by what he darkly called ‘powers we pretend to understand’. The ‘categorical question’ at stake is, as the title of one of Auden’s poems put it in exemplary fashion, ‘Which Side Am I Supposed to Be On?’The dilemma had particular force for Heaney at that time because of his own ...”

“... of mind occasioned by a superabundant flow of inspiration’, which would be a confirmation of the powers expected of Wordsworth. But Jonathan Wordsworth offered what has probably become the mainstream view: ‘this’ is a disorientating sense of sudden disability, of colossal hopes unexpectedly embarrassed. The questions, according to this view, are full of ...”

“... have disliked anyone holding power. The episode of 1521, when Wolsey is alleged to have packed Richard Pace off to Rome, has been misunderstood, for Pace was glad to go on his embassy, and his subsequent breakdown, normally blamed on the cardinal’s ruthlessness, merely shows how unreliable are the charges Pace brought against him. The Duke of Norfolk ...”

“... authority in Great Britain can be. All three of these books explore in different ways the powers and intrusions of the British state after the Glorious Revolution; and all three of them are tracts for the times in that they link its subsequent prominence and stability with Leviathan unbound rather than with an unusual degree of constitutional ...”

“... of the unexercised waster’. Oh dear. Mrs Humphry Ward was a sacred cow with considerable secular powers of retaliation at her disposal. But the force of the writer’s aggression, though characteristic, is perhaps not the most important fact to emerge from the article. I call ‘The Gospel according to Mrs Humphry Ward’ an article and not a review ...”