“... 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 ...”

“... of a kind of ‘benign’ piracy, operated by family and/or friends: specifically, on the part of Anne Shakespeare herself, acting through her brother William Hathaway – who would then be, as transmitter of the manuscript, the ‘Mr W.H.’ thanked by the publisher.* But the inclusion of ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ at the end of the 1609 collection has ...”

“... introduced in order to clarify the work’s intricate design. In her Cambridge edition from 2014, Anne Fernald established that, as befits a work originally known as ‘The Hours’, there were meant to be twelve sections. Mendelson provides an extensive note on the text which sifts the evidence for his choices. It’s hard to imagine that any future editor ...”

“... began her reign in 1837, she followed a line of Hanoverian men, who had occupied the throne since Anne, the last queen regnant, had died in 1714. By the early decades of the 19th century, the younger generation of royal males had largely forfeited public sympathy. George IV, William IV, the Duke of York (who was Victoria’s father) and the Duke of Cumberland ...”

“... part of the book) gathers together a coven of Gossips, Old Wives, Sybils, Mother Goose, Saint Anne, Little Red Riding Hood’s Granny and the Queen of Sheba. Inside the frame, ‘The Tales’ (the second half) casts a feminist gaze over Cinderella (aka Donkeyskin), Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard’s wives, the Beast’s Beauty, the Little Mermaid and the ...”

“... to be identified with the product. Even the Spice Girls turned them down – so much for girl power. But then, Johnson & Johnson, best known for baby powder and No More Tears shampoo, didn’t even want its own name used in Stayfree advertising. Americans may no longer believe, as they once did, that menstruating women can spoil meat, but they still see ...”

“... as a rush’ and, when finally they do have sex, they have it without role-playing, hierarchy, power imbalances or gender-bending. For all its quaint sexual vocabulary, the narrative is explicit enough to satisfy the curiosity of even the most demanding gay male reader: the boys are versatile. O’Neill’s elaborate periodisation, in other words, does not ...”

“... of usurpation and regicide haunted his short reign, and he spent most of his fourteen years in power putting down one conspiracy after another. A prophet had predicted that Henry would die in Jerusalem, where he hoped to go on pilgrimage to expiate his sins. Instead, he died in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey in 1413, aged 45. He had written a ...”

“... obtained only 6 per cent of the vote. At the 2022 election, its candidate, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, was obliterated, with less than 2 per cent. In France there are no natural parties of government.The collapse of the PS vote enabled Emmanuel Macron to win the 2017 and 2022 elections. A former adviser to and minister under Hollande, Macron never ...”