“... 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 ...”

“... They are not in a position to participate in Iraqi domestic life or understand the detail of local power and society. Things are not much better when organisations rely on middle-class or English-speaking Iraqis for information. It is not only Ahmed Chalabi who proved to have little idea about the situation in Iraq. Saddam’s regime worked hard to fragment ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hotter sort of Protestant smacked of popery-by-stealth. All four Stuart kings had Catholic queens (Anne of Denmark covertly) and absolutist tendencies, or at least a preference for consulting Parliament as infrequently as possible. Fewer parliaments meant less money, however, which tended to result in arbitrary taxation at home and a degree of suppliance ...”

“... it turned out, the British people could live quite serenely with being a second-rate ex-colonial power, but they would not stand for Altrincham’s mild lèse-majesté. He was subjected to even more abuse from the British press and public than Nasser or John Foster Dulles. In a widely photographed incident, Altrincham was physically assaulted. His assailant ...”

“... liberal writers who believe that everything went wrong in Israel after Mr Begin came to power in 1977. Before then, there had of course been problems, but it had been possible to believe in the Zionist dream and to be inspired to assist in its fulfilment. The Army had been imbued from the beginning with a chivalrous ethos known as ‘purity of ...”

“... point of view – a free invention of the case for Lady Caroline Lamb, say, or better still, for Anne Milbanke, his contemptuous lordship’s ‘princess of parallelograms’, a gifted lady who would have been better-off keeping house with an affectionate algebraist than shacking up in marital misery with a soda-swilling, sodomising monster. Speak as you ...”

“... of river boundaries, and on knowledge gained from watching the equestrian activities of Princess Anne. This last source is tapped by Professor R.A. Brown in a provocative paper on the social status of the Norman knight, calling for sympathy with the ‘sheer love of war’ which can be found in the governing classes of the Middle Ages. To exercise this ...”

“... of past women is not necessarily to learn much about the operation or the balance of past sexual power. A major surprise of Fraser’s book is her decision to draw so little on the imaginative literature of the time. Simple and obvious questions ask themselves. Why is there so large a gap between the depressed condition of women apparently prescribed by ...”

“... relic of times past, and in 1947 he contracted his last and apparently happiest marriage – to Anne Sullivan, a young, beautiful, spirited Irish Canadian almost as rich as he. Ridley’s protective attitude toward his subject is so undisguised as to be endearing. He paints him as a model of the aristocratic ideal, and explains away or skims over the rough ...”

“... over Steven Goldberg’s The Inevitability of Patriarchy (1973) in which he argued that men’s power in the world was a product of their testosterone-driven urge to succeed, regardless of the definition of success in any given society. But although he had based his arguments on the hormone research initiated by John Money and his colleagues, Goldberg was a ...”