“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... She chose to come to Cambridge University, where she was much influenced by Muriel Bradbrook and Anne Barton. She wrote her PhD dissertation there on Shakespeare. She composed The Female Eunuch in intervals between taking tea with Lord Brooke at Warwick Castle. And she has lambasted and lived in this country for most of her subsequent life, residing now in a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his character: The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of ...”

“... In Napoleon’s personal entourage, too, soldier-poets were anything but unusual. Guillaume-Marie-Anne Brune, born the son of a provincial lawyer in 1763, went to Paris to study law, but found work as a typesetter after his parents cut him off for having married against their will. Full of literary hopes, he published in 1788 a gushing, pre-Romantic account ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... strong feeling of independence had been enhanced during his upbringing by the sense of power that money gives, and even in his development as a physicist he was largely self-taught: he had never done any research under or with anyone and probably had hardly ever been contradicted by anyone of his age.’ Yet Kuhn found him courteous and considerate ...”

“... Lear give us the conceit of the fool’s ability – unique among courtiers – to speak truth to power without fear. ‘Kings do hate the truth,’ Erasmus observes in The Praise of Folly (1511). ‘But my fools … have a marvellous faculty of giving pleasure not only when they speak the truth but even when they utter open reproaches.’ Such fools tell the ...”

“... information we have concerns leases, wills, marriage lines, property. His pillow-talk with Anne Hathaway, Emilia Lanier or Mr W. H., interesting as it may have been, was not recorded. If you want to discuss Shakespeare, you have to depend on reading and seeing his work. Not so with Brecht. Not only did he write a great deal of commentary himself. All ...”