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“... violations of fundamental constitutional principles – the unchecked expansion of executive power, the utter disregard for habeas corpus and defendants’ rights in general, the warrantless mass surveillance of millions of citizens and the legitimation of torture as a military tactic. To warriors against terror, the Bill of Rights had become ...”

“... is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.’ These diaries encourage one to seek out connections between the ways in which Virginia Woolf found her life, her feelings, her ...”

“... relevant that Berryman, like other self-creating poets, had to invent a persona – that of ‘Anne Bradstreet’, or ‘Henry Pussycat’ – in order to become his real self set down in words. Lowell had no need for that: his self and his persona were both absolute Lowell. Yet he did share with his peers the general characteristics stated by Auden to be ...”

“... to go about their work. Talk must be men’s concern, all of them, and mine especially, for the power in the house is mine.’The anxious young man asserts himself here in a remarkable way. He virtually quotes an earlier hero, and that makes it particularly hard to assess the tone of his speech. In Book 6 of The Iliad Hector told his wife, Andromache, to go ...”

“... also quoted the artist Molly Crabapple’s thoughts on turning a mere thirty: ‘Staying alive has power. The years should give you competence and toughness along with the battle scars. You’ve survived.’ I’m not about to write to Mss Clune and Crabapple telling them they’re pathetic for thinking of themselves as ageing. It’s right and proper that ...”

“... financial, but Timon’s fall would have seemed to many to reflect a shift in wealth and power towards the merchants and bankers. Even more challenging is the sequence in which the bankrupt protagonist digs up a cache of gold and gives it away to whores and bandits as recklessly as he had earlier lavished gifts on his friends. As the tragedy becomes ...”

“... and moss, rifles downwards, to share in the joke. For me, it was an education in the proximate power of the sovereign.Balmoral seems to transcend its own locality in these moments. Politicians who would not otherwise be interested in a pilgrimage to rural Scotland revere it as a mark of having arrived in other places that matter. The newly elected leader ...”

“... drawing on classical iconography, Renaissance architecture, the curbing of magnate power and a consolidation of boundaries. These processes developed in Scotland as a result of James V’s residence in France, his French marriages and susceptibility to Gallic culture. The Scottish historian Roger Mason has said that the 1550s saw the ...”

“... and contrasting an ironic private humanity with the petty vanities and great harm of established power. Their narrative frequently centred on the difficulty of being a moody, clever, thin-skinned – and occasionally alcoholic – literate man who commands the devotion of a comely, plucky, self-denying younger woman … In the characterisation of women, the ...”

“... in case de Staël’s vengeance should light on them. Meanwhile, he appealed to his generous aunt, Anne de Nassau, to write to de Staël, begging her to give him his freedom. ‘He has been weak enough to put up with that servitude out of consideration for the pain you claim to be suffering and your histrionic grief,’ Madame de Nassau wrote. It was a good ...”

“... unideological, patronage-based one-party government. He agrees that between the death of Queen Anne and the accession of George III, the Tories had no share in government, and were systematically discriminated against in the distribution of local patronage. But where his opponents think 1688 was decisive, he does not; where they think the propertied ...”

“... Umayyad prince, Abd al Rahman, fled to a different peninsula on the edge of the Atlantic and took power in al-Andalus, the name given by the Arabs to the whole of Muslim Spain.The homage paid by Cervantes in Don Quixote to the heritage of Spanish Islam is seldom remarked on. (There isn’t a single reference to it in Harold Bloom’s weak, lazy introduction ...”

“... tang of the hot dog and pizza concession under the hot yellow lights.’‘One’, the Princess Anne pronoun, is a rare visitor to contemporary literary prose, not only because of its air of neutral authority – it’s just the sort of thing that makes the editorial blue pencil itch. By disowning subjectivity it more or less disqualifies itself, yet ...”

“... in the Independent of Picasso painting Guernica in 1937 in a collar and tie. 30 January. My friend Anne’s funeral and we are about to set off for the crematorium in the pouring rain when as we turn the car round a young pheasant skitters across the road. Nothing unusual in that except that this pheasant is pure white. I’m not given to a belief in signs or ...”

“... the bulldozer and the dinosaur was obvious to any child – but not the connection between the power of petrol and the mysterious beauty of the small trembling rainbow swirls in the many puddles of the 1970s.’ The curiously loose weave of Knausgaard’s prose allows it to return parts of the reader’s own life to them – maybe this is especially true ...”