“... 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 ...”

“... asked by either. But then I read the seminar title, ‘Fat beyond the Call of Duty: The Nature in Power within Psychiatry’, and I quite lost my footing. There are certain verbal nonsenses that induce the feeling – check the marmalade on the shelves and practise curtseying for when you land – that Alice experienced. Just close enough to sense and yet ...”

“... and spending, social life has become almost crusadingly secular. The break-up of the institutional power of the Catholic Church, the advent of mass media, the transformation in attitudes towards and opportunities for women are all consequences (and in some cases also causes) of Ireland’s status as one of the most globalised economies in the modern world. On ...”

“... which a saint had been washed for burial, straw from his bed, or shreds of her clothing still had power to heal. Women gave birth more easily when stroked by the iron belt of some ascetic who in life would have been appalled by the touch of a female. After a brisk march through the history of sainthood – from Peter and Paul to the Reformation in just ninety ...”

“... subfield, with its own conferences, journals and faculty positions. The ferociously disruptive power of capitalism in our own day makes inquiries into its origins appear all the more necessary. For a historian of capitalism, whose work will inevitably consider 18th-century Western Europe, one key question is how capitalism has shaped political life. Is ...”

“... lump’.In The Man Who Loved Children, Sam mocks his daughter Louisa seemingly to demonstrate his power over his offspring:‘Loochus, why did you go without shoes?’‘You said it would be better if the whole population went without shoes, it would harden them.’Sam looked and suddenly popped with laughter, then cried: ‘You’re a fathead!’A fear of ...”

“... the tiny scale of her specialness, and the pathos of her ultimate defeat, only goes to prove the power of that monolith in the topography of the Counter-Reformation. For Maria Janis wanted to be a saint, and she was a hundred or more years too late to be believed. Several 16th-century English women, Tina Krontiris points out in Oppositional Voices, chafed ...”

“... Scottish notion of a General Assembly appeared an entirely unwarrantable encroachment on sovereign power. Watching the extent to which the English failed so much as to realise the Scots had this idea, we realise how well Thomas Cromwell had done his work, and how important it is that he never had a Scottish counterpart. In what must have been a remarkably ...”

“... others by fellow-travellers at the heart of the British Establishment. What a crime for a great power to occupy a small nation and rule it along authoritarian lines! Yes, indeed, but for Soviet imperialism to stand out in its full iniquity, it is just as well to omit all reference to British or American imperialism – or, if pushed, to describe them as ...”

“... Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, curated by the American art historian Anne Wagner and her British husband T.J. Clark, is the most radical and exciting re-evaluation of a British artist I have ever encountered, and a thrilling display of how paint conveys ideas, time, place, building a self-contained world at once absorbing and convincing in its relation to lived experience ...”

“... that can unfit you afterwards for normal conversation, that can make the suburbs seem beyond your power of understanding as you drive home past them from the locked-in place. You suspect that even from the other side of the frame she is noticing you, and people who notice are inconvenient, if not uncivilised. It would, after all, be uncomfortable to be on a ...”

“... of their education made it easy for men to sneer at their mental capacity. They were kept from power and from the control of money, and then ignored since their province did not include these important areas of life. That they were inferior was obvious from the Fall. A good supralapsarian Calvinist could not actually claim that, but for Eve, Adam would ...”

“... that was to have enormous consequences: he renounced the fictional space and limited the dramatic power of painting; what remained suitable for an easel picture and was to be expected on the stage was not suited to the mural. During the same period the new Houses of Parliament in London were being decorated with murals by a group of leading British painters ...”

“... emerged in the first quarter of the 20th century, a consequence primarily of the growing electoral power of the Labour Party. Founded in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), which united trade unionists and socialists, Labour became a parliamentary presence after the 1906 general election. Before the First World War, its MPs acted primarily as a ...”

“... about the Revolutionary women themselves. Figures who do not quite fit – like Marat’s printer, Anne Félicité Colombe, or Louise Kéralio, a radical but middle-class journalist – are forever consigned to the footnotes; and we are no nearer to being able to imagine the day-today life of the ordinary woman. Godineau wonders if, in the field of ...”