“... Knights stresses that ideas of fiduciary public trust were first advanced by critics of royal power during the Civil War. These men talked of a public good: the ideal office-holder should be impartial, selfless and accountable; any corruption or venality was a ‘breach of trust’. They drew up a ‘black list’ of MPs who had accepted offices and ...”

“... animist tenderness in Hughes’s writing, a tenderness that plays against his celebration of feral power. It’s like the last line of a short early poem ‘Snowdrop’ – ‘Her pale head heavy as metal’ – where nature and human artifice come gently together.Inevitably, though, it is biographical interest that these letters stimulate. We catch Hughes’s ...”

“... appearing with splendour in the charming court where she came to reign’. The display of sex and power at this charming court was unusual. Charles paraded his mistresses, canoodling with them in public. They, and the king, were lampooned in shocking and exaggerated satire. Charles’s ‘sceptre and his prick are of a length’, John Wilmot, earl of ...”

“... that they overlook its obvious concomitants in keeping down the standard of wages and purchasing power, and the spread of desolation over their own countryside. Their eyes only seem to be fixed on overseas trade.There are those who argue that it was this depression – and the sense of betrayal it engendered in farmers between the wars – that led the ...”

“... came again, now changed with time, Which shocked me, but still beautiful. ‘You have usurped my power and name – Your work misjudged, these people pitiful.’ I shrugged. ‘So usurp it back again.’ Although a Dubliner, Quinn works in Prague, and the sequence from which ‘Ur-Aisling’ comes – ‘Days of the New Republic’ – refers as much to the ...”

“... Rediger settles on a nearby literary analogy. As he reminds François, they are in the house where Anne Desclos, Jean Paulhan’s lover, wrote The Story of O. For all its ‘ostentatious kitsch’, Rediger says, The Story of O captured ‘the astonishing and simple idea… that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission’. His ...”

“... its reliance on the slightly shallow brilliance of simile as opposed to the deeper, more reflexive power of metaphor. You’re meant to be thrilled by it, but not to linger too long, for it’s leading you into a story, not trying to stop you in your tracks. In that respect, it is very like a lot of the best lines in current verse – lines that dazzle briefly ...”

“... are properly a function of medical ethics rather than law, it is the law which holds the ultimate power to determine where the territory of medical ethics ends and the realm of the insured risk begins. The difference in levels at which medical negligence can occur, as the book’s opening chapter explains, is of key relevance. Once an individual is qualified ...”

“... will believe almost anything else: that Thomas More was a martyr for freedom of conscience, that Anne Boleyn was a witch, and that the monasteries were dissolved by men on horseback who rode in mob-handed and decapitated monks with battle-axes. It is a long time now since triumphalist Protestantism held sway, either in academic or popular belief. Among ...”

“... within it, The Corrections sets itself apart from the work of contemporary American writers like Anne Tyler for whom the family never stopped being central. As well as looking inwards to family dynamics of love, hate and mutual incomprehension, Franzen looks outwards to the worlds of corporate power, government ...”

“... the most important rescued buildings Tinniswood discusses are Hever Castle in Kent, the home of Anne Boleyn, which was done up by the Astors, and Henry VIII’s Eltham Palace, which acquired a dazzling if slightly incongruous extension in the Moderne style for the Courtaulds. Estate agents were not slow to take note of the historical wow factor and ...”

“... of ‘the eternal’, art may sign away its epic prestige, surrendering its totalising power to what Lukács would later lament as the ‘kaleidoscopic chaos’ of modern narrative impressionism. Ford’s Hardy combines in this way – if complicatedly – the eternal and the modern. The ‘half a Londoner’ he brings into relief is the young man ...”

“... queen, the next he’s charvering his way through London’s upper-class totty, including Princess Anne: when did this vigorous brigadier find time to get his soldiering done? Meanwhile, in front of him at a dinner, his wife is groin-grinding with the heir to the throne – which shocks Lord Soames’s staff in Southern Rhodesia (or, as officials called ...”

“... Koch and Schuyler; orbiting them were their friends Barbara Guest, Harry Mathews, Fairfield and Anne Porter, and Edwin Denby. Their social circles overlapped with Abstract Expressionist and New York School painters, and tendrils extended out into the worlds of ballet (it was the Balanchine era), classical music and Broadway. Cedar Tavern regulars populate ...”

“... all of it filtered through David’s anaesthetised gaze and precocious schoolboy prose. The power of The Neon Bible resides in its descriptions of the small town where David’s childhood is unspent. But, as the reader admires Toole’s writing, questions form. Was he really only 16 when he wrote it? Did he perhaps revise or wholly rewrite the text at a ...”