“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... life in it to be ginger, and isn’t clean enough to be grey’.When Marlowe meets the journalist Anne Riordan, the nearest Chandler comes to creating a female character not entirely defined by her relationship to men, the first thing he says by way of conversation is to tell her what colour her hair is. ‘Your hair’s red,’ he says. ‘There are blondes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”