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“... fashionable Emersonian leader of metropolitan free thought, and was employed as a pamphleteer by Thomas Scott, Voysey’s wealthy patron. These unconventional yet genteel circles were only the prelude to a yet more drastic move into the plebeian world of secularism. By 1875 she had accepted employment on Charles Bradlaugh’s National Reformer and begun her ...”

“... almost wherever she went, for Graves these conflicts were evidence of her ineffable, otherworldly powers, ‘tourbillions in Time made’, as he once put it, ‘By the strong pulling of her bladed mind/Through that ever-reluctant element’. Riding’s own extraordinary poetry added to the mystique of her invulnerability; its severe abstract propositions ...”

“... at war with the West though not with Russia. Alongside Germany she was one of the occupying powers against which Tito’s Partisans, with British support, were fighting in Yugoslavia. Now, however, self-interest was bringing the country under the increasing influence of an advancing Russia, even while the Comintern, based in Moscow and led by the ...”

“... or sociologists. One giddying factor, though, was our dissatisfaction with the leading Communist powers – since both China and the Soviet Union seemed to be giving too little assistance to Vietnam, the land of burning children: when the liberalised government of Czechoslovakia was suppressed by Soviet troops, many left-wingers in Western Europe felt as if ...”

“... his life to his work, as happens in Lowell or Berryman. Essentially Schwartz was, like Dylan Thomas, a dazzling phrasemaker. His first lines were usually his best, and these often became the poems’ titles: ‘Dogs are Shakespearean, Children are strangers’, ‘In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave’, ‘The Beautiful American Word, Sure’. Phrases ...”

“... seems to have been happiest when being a chum to her admirers. After Bland’s death she married Thomas Tucker, Captain of the Woolwich ferry, who, Mrs Briggs explains, ‘had the vowels of a London waterman, however genuine his feelings’. The Tuckers adopted nautical jargon, brewed coffee in the Captain’s galley, and danced hornpipes. Nesbit, who said ...”

“... Party, and of the Archbishop’s energetic cultivation of his standing among the non-aligned powers. Plans worked out by the former Secretary of State Dean Acheson would have provided for another bargain between Greeks and Turks over the heads of the two Cypriot communities, under which most of the island would have gone to Greece, with some protection ...”

“... belief in the privilege and privacy of consciousness, or the Kantian belief in the constitutive powers of the ego. Foucault’s attack on the concept of man and on ‘humanism’ is a forceful way of saying that the subject is not given with permanent structures that condition reality, but produced historically from its social world. Moving away from ...”

“... divorce. As he wrote in Love and Exile, ‘I had made up my mind a long time ago that the creative powers of literature lie not in the forced originality produced by variations of style and word machinations but in the countless situations life keeps creating, especially in the queer complications between man and woman. For the writer, they are potential ...”

“... his career was a slippery mixture of principled conviction and clever accommodation to the ruling powers. There is a curious moment in his preface where he goes out of his way to assert that Virgil was ‘still of republican principles in his heart’. He then contrives to make Augustus sound like a constitutional monarch and so edges a step closer to the new ...”

“... by the doctrine of terra nullius. It was a case of first come, first served for the European powers, especially when the native inhabitants proved insufficiently organised (not recognisably human enough) to treat with. That they were not seen only made them more feared in the remote early settlements at Sydney Cove and elsewhere. Just what claims to ...”

“... salvation, in a sweeping pose, with fanfares, lighting effects and scenery.’ For the Entente powers, the German war machine was a sort of Wagnerian nightmare.Hitler’s obsession with Wagner’s music seemed to settle the matter. Gustav Stresemann, chancellor of the Weimar Republic, despaired at the way the Bayreuth clique had managed to ‘touch up the ...”

“... was a growing political force whose immediate enemy were the colonial and ex-colonial European powers. The new Jewish state of Israel, set on land Palestinians knew as their own, was also a goad.’ As an account of the last sixty years, Lessons is an embarrassment – so it’s fortunate that, being a psychologically minded novelist, McEwan has designs ...”

“... to turn on the strange goings-on of 1548, which involved Catherine Parr and her fourth husband Thomas Seymour, brother of the Protector Somerset, a marriage which, thanks to Elizabeth’s presence in the household, became something of a ménage à trois: risky romps in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, the curious episode in the garden when Seymour cut her dress ...”

“... in the early summer of 1933 …’ Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from Thomas Bernhard, who also influenced Sebald’s diction of extremism. Almost every sentence in this book is a cunning combination of the quiet and the loud: ‘As usual when I go down to London on my own,’ the narrator tells us in a fairly typical passage, ‘a ...”