“... 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 ...”

“... that af Klint transcribed warned that ‘Hilma will receive a great gift, if she never forgets the power of the highest,’ a pact she entered into willingly. It was a spirit who insisted that ‘the paintings must remain hidden from the eyes of the general public until the time to come forward is possible.’ Another suggested, and af Klint acquiesced, that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and counter-balance, one muscle nudging another, the force of gravity covertly supplying extra power at key moments, that were involved in the complicated journeys. ‘Two things,’ he said ‘One. When I didn’t die at 16, as most people with what I’ve got do, I took in that I was nevertheless doomed to get worse and worse. I was tempted to become ...”

“... any way of checking what had caused a ‘cure’: it could have been the waters, or the healing power of Nature, or the effects of rest, change of diet, company and surroundings. A resolute invalid could have taken the cure at home in his own bathtub. These doubts and uncertainties were as old as the history of spas. Andrea Bacci, writing from Venice in ...”

“... the pages of a book. Or in a bookish context. Side-stepping the traumatic link between gossip and power, Dr Spacks suggests that throughout history it has been chiefly both the weapon and the consolation of the powerless, a special bond of female solidarity. She begins the book on a personal note. Over a number of years she and a woman colleague, equally ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”