“... 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 ...”

“... of crushing banality: ‘The 17th century was a most exciting time, with its shifts in political power, and with its rise and fall of kings, there was, predictably enough, a rise and fall in the fortunes of many of the subjects.’ Again: ‘While the emerging middle class was in general looking more to reading as a source of information, enlightenment and ...”

“... enthusiasms, Freud ran a close second to Marx. He attended Lacan’s seminars at Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital and went into analysis with him. In 1955 he began working at the La Borde clinic in the Loire Valley as a committed Lacanian.At La Borde, however, as Dosse reveals, Guattari’s thinking evolved away from Freudian ...”

“... He had been tried for treason in 1945, while General de Gaulle was still in his first spell of power. The hero of Verdun was sentenced to death by one vote, but the court asked for the sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment in view of the marshal’s great age, which was a relief to de Gaulle. Since then Pétain had been banged up on the Ile ...”

“... Radcliffe, Ann: Sévigné, Marie de; Seward, Anna; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft; Staël-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de Worldly, informed and informal, the index is a fitting finale to an edition which extends the range of information scholarly editions usually provide. It responds not only to the cosmopolitan spread of Byron’s ...”

“... Mother’, Inglis shows how, by the middle of the 19th century, the mother came to represent the power of the Church in the home. Deprived of economic power, she was given immense moral authority. ‘The way for the mother to obtain the priest’s blessing and approval was to bring up her children within the limits that he ...”

“... moves as though the whole thing were a martial art, so the activity inverts expectations about power relations even while seeming to make them pretty darn obvious.Williams has visited some discreet emporia in the UK that offer instruction in this art (apparently they treated her like the Queen Mother), and has made some excellent drawings of people tying ...”

“... can be a form of domination, and being lavish with one’s own values can be a cover for taking power. ‘As nature, inexorable, onward, resistless, impassive amid the threats and screams of disputants, so America,’ Whitman wrote to Emerson. ‘Let all defer.’ By starting in Whitman’s era, and ending in the distant future, Cunningham has made his ...”

“... of the story’. The burning question became not how or whether science can usurp the deity’s power of bestowing life on inanimate matter, but as Mary Shelley was so frequently asked, ‘how I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea’. Where the 1818 preface spoke dismissively of ‘a mere tale of spectres or ...”

“... death in 1878. Presumably, Kemble had no intention of publishing the ‘Answer of Frances Anne Butler to the Libel of Pierce Butler Praying for Divorce’, but this narrative, too, became public when the newspapers got hold of copies in the midst of the couple’s protracted divorce negotiations in 1848. The Butler marriage was one of those unions ...”

“... at the intersection between the real and the imagined … Intense, erotic, incandescent in the power and beauty of its prose, T.PB is an astonishing achievement.’ Jeanette Winterson generally writes her own jacket copy. If you hadn’t already guessed. Inside, there’s an entity called Ali who lives in Spitalfields, East London: ‘The sign on the shop ...”

“... been true: many poets have discovered many different keys to unlock certain doors. For emotional power, Thomas Wyatt, circa 1536: From depth of sin, and from a deep despair, From depth of death, from depth of heart’s sorrow, From this deep cave, of darkness deep repair, Thee have I called, O Lord, to be my borrow. Thou in my voice, O Lord, perceive and ...”

“... Mary, little bright-necked one; get them, sun of women, from your son who has them in his power.’ Her worship has taken many forms, not just artistic and liturgical but acrobatic: a lay brother at the monastery of Clairvaux, who had joined not knowing the liturgy, offered his praises to Mary by walking about on his hands at night, while his brethren ...”

“... and Economic Relations of English and American Quakers, 1750-85,’ completed a decade earlier by Anne T. Gary, an American pursuing a doctorate in modern history at Oxford.A Barclays publicist responded a few days later. ‘David Barclay formed a committee of London Quakers to oppose the slave trade, and later became involved with the committee in taking the ...”