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“... for publication at the time, this group of linked stories conveys an implicit faith in the power of fiction to act as a prophylaxis against false philosophy and perverted dogma. The irony of the title is expected to act as a solvent upon such artificial and old-fashioned constraints. Five women, each of whom has an individual predicament though her ...”

“... to learn that Mayfair retains its high status and exclusive reputation: but the riches and power to which it now plays host are institutional and governmental rather than patrician or titled. The Mayfair Estate came into the Grosvenor family through an advantageous marriage in 1677 between Sir Thomas Grosvenor and the heiress Mary Davies, who also ...”

“... at a progressive boarding school and joined the Communist Young Pioneers. When Hitler came to power the family fled, after brief stops in Switzerland and France, to the Great Soviet Union the boys had heard so much about. Markus remained there for 11 years, becoming ‘Misha’ and acquiring fluent Russian during a Moscow adolescence. The Purges affected ...”

“... traiterous and wicked designs … and also craftily designed to reproach and scandalise [Queen Anne’s] wise and faithful ministry, divide her councils, create variances, disputes and discords in her parliament, and to raise and foment animosities, fears and jealousies amongst all her people’. A reprint was swiftly issued to replace incinerated ...”

“... in the world invest in and encourage those projections (think, for example, of the Beefeater or Anne Hathaway’s cottage) as well as exploiting them for their own ends. What we are dealing with, in other words, is one aspect of the power struggle – or at least the complex negotiation – between visitor and ...”

“... Facebook may have started as a way to rank one woman’s hotness over another’s, but it has been quick to produce its first feminists. Everything goes faster in Silicon Valley: code is written overnight; engineers get around the office on aerodynamic skateboards called RipStiks; a company less than ten years old is worth $104 billion for a day before losing $35 billion in value ...”

“... In her introduction to Records of Woman, Feldman agrees with other Romanticists such as Anne Mellor and Jerome McGann that Hemans ‘defies’, ‘undercuts’ and ‘criticises’ the feminine domestic ideal she appears to represent. In other words, she emerges from the 20th century less of a lady than was previously thought, and more of a ...”

“... Richard Flanagan trained as a historian, and his novels have often emphasised the redemptive power of memory. For his characters, though, remembering is a strenuous business. There are traps to be avoided and barriers to overcome – an obstacle course of crying jags, guilt-ridden stupors, deathbed hallucinations ...”

“... governance. Royal intimacy might have been delicious and intoxicating, but it came with real power.Francis Bacon – who had known a few favourites and was himself a favourite of Buckingham’s – knew it was an office to be discharged carefully. ‘You are his shadow,’ he warned Buckingham, and since ‘the king himself is above the reach of his ...”

“... Norton, the Jaguars lay nose-to-nose with the Daimlers and the 300SL Mercedes. Fleets of scarlet power boats slashed the Blackwater with their wakes, and the marina at Bradwell was slacked solid with Chris Crafts and Princesses. People here were fast and flash; they had fun, and they enjoyed letting other people see the colour of their money. We took to ...”

“... Will Run the Frog Hospital?, her best work to date, is an intelligent coming-of-age story whose power stems partly from its indifference to the expectation that teenage girls be either deferent or boy-crazy. Beginning in Paris, where the grownup narrator is travelling, it interweaves reflections on her deteriorating marriage with vivid evocations of her ...”

“... being a realistic status by discerning, in the individual, a “deep” motive, a “creative” power, or a “design” the milieu in which writing originates. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologising terms, of the operations that we force texts to ...”

“... Charlotte Sophia chastising her son William for being ‘a true trifling character’, emigrant Anne Francis on the ants and jackals greeting colonists in South Africa, Fanny Burney on her mastectomy, two reports of witnessing executions and five different accounts of hot-air balloon voyages. There is John Addington Symonds’s description of Tennyson and ...”

“... absolutism. It is also worth asking why the decline of tragedy coincided with the waning of such power. The scholars who write in the volume on medieval tragedy are in the unenviable position of those who argue for the existence of the yeti. Such tragedy has long been thought not to exist, partly because the Christian faith which informs the period is ...”

“... descendants remained powerful property-owners, was in some accounts an incarnation of tyrannical power and in others a justly acquitted victim of an insubordinate servant. In Miriam Coles Harris’s The Sutherlands, an 1860 novel with abolitionist leanings, Anna loses her candles, her howlings and her ghostly cow and becomes a slave with mixed African and ...”