“... was a poetics of absence – a philosophical echo of Mallarmé’s remark that what defines ‘rose’ as a word is ‘l’absence de toute rose’. Derrida, a passionate reader of Mallarmé, made a similar argument about language by drawing on – and radicalising – Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. Saussure ...”

“... clandestine eroticism come into the open, in a carnival of the damned. A convict called Broadway Rose put on a sex show, and the prison’s ‘boy-girls’ offered their services in cells covered by red curtains. In Himes’s ‘To What Red Hell’, it’s the fire that enables this liberation of desire, before extinguishing it: ‘Oh, Lawd, ma man’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Powell, but he was not destined to be on the backbenches for long. In a debate on the NHS he rose to take on the speaker all Tories feared most, Aneurin Bevan. A few months later, Churchill made him Minister of Health. Macleod was so shaken that he had to go to a phone box to find out where on earth his ministry was. He announced that he would be the ...”

“... seemed an ordeal for her; it was as if the camera hurt her. But while many hostile to the movies rose in defence of the devastation of Marilyn Monroe – whether or not she was a sentient victim – Novak was stoical, obdurate, or sullen. She allowed very few barriers between that raw self and the audience and now looks dignified, reflective, and responsive ...”

“... and in this its title supports me, for, though West is discussing Robert Elsmere, The Case of Richard Meynell and Daphne, the ethos that Mrs Humphry Ward puts forward is the only thing that really interests her. Even when she comments that on every relevant page the face of the heroine Catherine Leyburn ‘works with emotion and is illuminated by a ...”

“... desires and concedes that the power rests on language alone. An apostrophe such as Blake’s ‘O rose, thou art sick’ figuratively closes the gap between the post-Enlightenment poet and the natural object he addresses. Yet ‘it figures this reconciliation as an act of will, as something to be accomplished poetically in the act of apostrophising; and ...”

“... his contemporaries, like Cranmer, burned in Oxford, and William Gardiner, burned in Lisbon. ‘Une rose d’automne est plus qu’une autre exquise,’ Mme Yourcenar remarks, ‘was written not by Ronsard to celebrate some aging beauty but by d’Aubigné to glorify a belated martyr of the Reformation’. When d’Aubigné escaped burning, through the offices ...”

“... book draws to a close. Its title is accurate as to its content and style: ‘Diana. “You was a Rose in a Garden of Weeds.” ’ The impetuosity which explains the existence of the first part of the book damages the second, which is called ‘Voicing the Constitution’. Here Barnett sets out to ‘outline a case for reform’, opening with ‘a lengthy ...”

“... of the 15th Hussars at the age of 34 for £35,000, something like £2 million today, and then rose after a fashion to command the Light Brigade. Such officers were expected to look good on the parade ground, but they regarded the serious study of tactics as beneath a gentleman’s dignity. Few senior officers emerge with credit from Figes’s ...”

“... they were permitted to operate, and who in turn took their place in a chain of command that rose all the way to the presidency. This arrangement ran smoothly until marijuana’s newfound popularity led Richard Nixon to declare a ‘war on drugs’ and to begin putting pressure on the Mexican government to staunch the ...”

“... to bring countries together than any number of EU directives.’ He quotes another political hero, Richard Cobden, the Manchester textile manufacturer and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, who described free trade as ‘God’s diplomacy’, not bothering to notice that in the case of the redundant cotton weavers of Bengal, the casualties of cheap Lancashire cloth, God ...”

“... be amusing as well as alarming. The Late Lancashire Witches, a play of 1634 by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was both subversive comedy and topical commentary. In each case, the witches are female, their bodies corruptible, their passions unbridled. They mock and menace patriarchal political order (in The Late Lancashire Witches a codpiece is bewitched to ...”

“... Wilkinson’s book, although only in passing).Muhammad Ali lifted the export ban, however, to let Richard Lepsius ship antiquities to Berlin. The head of a Prussian expedition that retraced the savants’ steps in the 1840s, Lepsius made his first visit to the pyramids on 15 October 1842, Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s birthday. On the pyramid of Khufu, his team ...”

“... But her very existence, in its unapologetic vitality, was enough to provoke. The graphic designer Richard Hollis, a contemporary at Wimbledon, found her ‘over-lush, you could say. I don’t know if you’d call it pushy.’ Of her work he says: ‘It’s direct, energetic, and I think that’s how she was … Her work looks quite confident, which is what ...”