“... and stamina. His career spanned three reigns and four decades, from the first flexing of comic power in The Isle of Dogs (1597) to the last melancholy fragments of The Sad Shepherd, probably written in the final year of his life. During that time he wrote 18 plays, 37 masques and court entertainments, two volumes of poetry and a volume of epigrams. This ...”

“... were no less authoritative. He rejected images, ceremonies, the sacraments, saints’ days, the power, wealth and economic oppressiveness of the Church, and a mediating priesthood: laymen had a right to preach. More positively, Menocchio accepted a sort of materialist pantheism, such as was to be reproduced in mid-17th-century England by Ranters and Gerrard ...”

“... of Orange and his sister-in-law and successor as ruler of England, Scotland and Ireland, Queen Anne. Problems with the royal finances had substantially contributed to England’s near century of revolution under the Stuarts, but after the Glorious Revolution new systems of public debt developed which enabled the state to wage war far more ...”

“... the doctrine of the resurrection is correct or incorrect … Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.’ She believed in what her books portray: a relationship between humans and other animals that is evident but unexplained. Peter Rabbit was an immediate success and soon the ...”

“... we are’ or ‘where we come from’. Olson begins his book holding out great hopes for the power of genetics to reconstruct human ancestry, but ends it by saying that people’s identity is determined by political and historical circumstances, by their abilities, experience, social background, upbringing and choice, not by their DNA. Even in the case ...”

“... resulting infant would resemble her husband and her adultery remain concealed. There was a wild power in the maternal imagination.The slightest disorder during pregnancy – badly aligned stars, stagnant air, intestinal gas, a sneeze – could shake loose a foetus ‘like fruit [from] a tree’, according to one 16th-century jurist. The body was not only ...”

“... waters of Lake Atitlan in the highlands of Guatemala. Like other vulnerable birds, it had lost the power of flight. In the 1960s, its population was down to about eighty: the birds’ habitat had been severely reduced first by reed-cutting for the mat-making industry, and next by Pan Am (which in due course also became extinct). The airline had developed the ...”

“... even than Rhodes. It was the greatest siege in history.’ Catherine’s constable, Anne de Montmorency, had been arguing for Rhodes, but even he had to concede that more guns had been fired, more mines dug, at Malta. La Roche, who was present at the siege, though he played an inglorious part in Malta’s defence, virtually recommending ...”

“... Amanda Bailey’s Shakespeare on Consent argues that sexual choice is problematic because of the power imbalances not just between genders but between racial groups, inequalities that have led down the years to a disproportionate number of accusations of sexual assault being made against black men in America (she teaches at the University of Maryland). Any ...”

“... in the small company of those – Byron, Nijinsky, Valentino, the last Prince of Wales – with power over the sexual imaginations of millions. Like an incubus, the Olivier of the Thirties and Forties could enter the dreams of the young, the reveries of the less young, and bring them to orgasm. Had he lived three centuries earlier, he might have risked ...”

“... being written for those to whom the world is new and strange, for those who are without economic power, and for those who need short, sharp, bold stories, children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning. But you cannot claim to be a magician and ...”

“... to his wife. I do not believe it bears that meaning at all. Disraeli obviously had a row with Mary Anne, spent a night elsewhere, lied about his destination and squared his sister about his whereabouts. ‘I am rather confused and shaky,’ he writes, ‘having had a bad night in a strange bed.’ The suggestion that he was sleeping with some unnamed lady or ...”

“... have been the relative social and gender equality of Dutch society which encouraged those holding power to seek to ‘accentuate the symbols of their hegemony and the respect due to their guardianship’. The coherence of the ruling class, and the close relations between patron and artist, both in assertive mood, lend credence to her thesis. The ...”

“... the aura of its double pre-eminence. The halo of an unmatched concentration of national life and power radiates around it. The reality of the country, however, exceeds its capital more deeply and vividly than the reality of England exceeds London. Not France, but the regnant bulk of the United Kingdom, embracing 84 per cent of its population, is by far the ...”

“... Africa ceased to be a country where races were segregated by law. Yet no one in a position of power was called to account for the relegation of millions of South Africans to derelict Bantustans, the forcible removal of hundreds of thousands of non-white urban dwellers to shanty towns and rural areas, the coercive discrimination in every aspect of public ...”