“... in the Sixties was only about 10 per cent; and in their study of science fiction audiences, Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch note the continuing rejection of Star Trek by ‘the male establishment of literary science fiction fandom’. Actually, no group of fans can be called an establishment: none of them has any ...”

“... crags latticed with icicles, towards Altissimo. Michelangelo chose stone and worked here, so did Henry Moore. A photo of Moore, sunburnt in a short-sleeved shirt, eyeing a boulder among clean-shaven cliffs and curls of old steel hawser, and soaring white-faced mountains, has drawn me to this place. On the terrace outside our cottage, the shiny black ...”

“... to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish faith in the imagination’s power to summon new worlds into existence. Philosophically, this suspicion of realism went hand in hand with a rejection of rationalism and materialism. If there is such an entity as the Irish mind, it is of a strongly idealist bent. Realism was in any case never ...”

“... to adulthood. There were two boys, on whom much hope and all the spare money were expended. Henry turned out the Branwell of the family, a drinker who went to America and was erased from family history. Frederic led a quiet life as a minister. It was the sisters who were exceptional and the four eldest, Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa, who made up ...”

“... information, were more accommodating. For some, visitation was an opportunity to speak truth to power; to tell a sombre ecclesiastical official in his expensive robes what needed fixing. The vast majority of reports concerned sex out of wedlock, which disrupted the household, the basic unit of patriarchal authority. The offence was often called ...”

“... an important part of the postwar security architecture established by the US at the height of its power. What the US needed was territorial reach. Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the three colonial territories granted dominion status by Britain in 1907, were to play a significant role. In the 19th century the British Empire had compensated for the loss of ...”

“... to stand up to what the editors call in their introduction ‘the destructive, itinerant power of capital’, and they are acutely conscious that New Labour barely even put up a fight. That’s because liberals never put up a fight: all they do is talk about individuals, with their rights and responsibilities, their choices and their ...”

“... feelings, by pity and sympathy, as by presumptuous snobbery.’ Romantics loathe abuses of power, but invariably end up worshipping power itself, sometimes indiscriminately: ‘The caliph of Baghdad is no less romantic than the patriarch of Jerusalem. Here everything can be substituted for everything else.’ Above ...”

“... husband). In fact she starts a new volume of the diary at the end of July 1916 by claiming that ‘Henry’s position in the country and in the cabinet is stronger than it has ever been.’ Despite or partly because of all her defects, the diaries never cease to entertain, and they turn out to be remarkably enlightening too, if not always in the advertised ...”

“... widens rapidly outward from there. Our best living Shakespeare critic, Wilson Knight, has claimed Henry VIII as a great Christian drama; it would not be precisely the play that I would choose, but a similar kind of case could be made for, say, the gaol scene in Cymbeline as among the most original Christian writing of the late Renaissance. In the same ...”

“... action, none is as lethal as ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard. Although liberal-minded intellectuals have repeatedly ...”

“... Blood) or refused to make room for her as a Platonic third within a passionate marriage (Henry Fuseli) or abandoned her with an out-of-wedlock child (Gilbert Imlay) or otherwise failed to value her with the intensity, constancy and perseverance she required. These disappointments made her bitterly unhappy. They did not stop her from carrying on with ...”

“... the early decades of her reign. If equilibrium was occasionally upset by a new court favourite or power broker (Robert Dudley, say, or Christopher Hatton), or sometimes a policy (on military intervention abroad, perhaps, or, most divisive of all, on marriage alliances for the queen), much of the time the court functioned well. The challenge was to keep things ...”

“... or was believed to, which sometimes had the same result. Robert Elliott’s classic study of The Power of Satire tells us that poems were used as weapons of war in pre-Islamic Arabia, and it is not only there, or in the curses of primitive tribesmen remote from our literary tradition, that this ‘power’ showed ...”

“... The human family’, Henry Drummond wrote in The Ascent of Man (1894), is ‘the starting-point and threshold of the true moral life’. Man carries ‘old wild blood in his veins’, while woman makes a home: her passivity is ‘the embryo of patience’. Children, closer to nature, need moral training at their mother’s side ...”