“... and salute. The Ceausescus divided Romania into his ’n’ hers, like bath towels, his nuclear power plant, her petrochemicals factory – they treated it like their living-room. In an interior decoration jag, Elena Ceausescu ordered that all the net curtains in Romania be taken down. She said it was because she wanted ‘a transparent society’. It is ...”

“... for Manhattan Beach just after 9/11. ‘It made me think about the trajectory of American global power,’ she told the New York Times, ‘and wonder about the future of that trajectory, but also, wonder about the past of it: World War Two.’ So what does Manhattan Beach tell us about this? For Anna, the isolated people she sees while walking round the city ...”

“... Literary criticism seems to be putting on weight in its old age – Margaret Anne Doody’s book is well over three hundred thousand words and loaded with learning, which may appal the fainthearted, but they should take into account that throughout its length it is written with verve and wit, and is by any standard an extraordinary and idiosyncratic achievement ...”

“... that of Inspector Lestrade in six Sherlock Holmes films during the Forties. One of the virtues of Anne Edwards’s book is that she gives in a footnote a potted biography of every actor and actress she mentions. These notes have great period interest, as well as commending themselves to film buffs. The Depression was on when Jane Eyre was produced, and ...”

“... work with the horses, of the unity of man and nature. He treats the horses he breaks with gentle power rather than brute strength: He’d ride sometimes clear to the upper end of the laguna before the horse would even stop trembling and he spoke constantly to it in Spanish in phrases almost biblical repeating again and again the strictures of a yet untabled ...”

“... signs of former institutionalised tyranny in our country, of heavy monarchy and strangling church power, perhaps we cannot imagine how they might still weigh on the soul of the people in modern democratic nations who have to live with them and with their obviously still-living aura. Our past is recent, and we know we still need it, even if we do tear down ...”

“... be over as the couple started to enjoy the hard work and keen pleasures that come with political power. It was also in 1989 that Kirk McCambley was born. It is difficult for grown-ups – the adults who lived through the tedium and anguish of the Northern Troubles – to imagine what this boy’s life has been like. When he was five, the first IRA ceasefire ...”

“... Fashion was always famous for its power, but only quite recently have people believed it has meaning. From time to time during the last two hundred years, writers have uneasily asserted that everything important about individuals, even about whole civilisations, could be learned from what people wore; but by the end of the 20th century, the meaning of clothing had become a respectable subject in its own right ...”

“... There would be other such relationships: an altogether more chaste version of domination with Anne Bradby (later the poet Anne Ridler); more erotic relationships with Olive Speake, and Thelma Shuttleworth, and Anne Renwick, and Joan Wallis (whom he beat in his office with an umbrella ...”

“... the Shah!’: these are the people bringing a tyrant down simply by marching, the people having ‘power over their lives and the course of things’. Persian Nights is a story about the limits of change – and, finally, its impossibility. The non-Iranians in Diane Johnson’s novel are mainly good guys. Not, for example, your common-or-garden entrepreneur ...”

“... thinks of the memoirs Prozac Nation and Girl, Interrupted. But there’s a casually intimidating power to Moshfegh’s writing – the deadpan frankness and softly cutting sentences – that makes any comparison feel not quite right. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is written in multiple modes at once: comedy and tragedy and farce, blurring into one ...”

“... indispensable right hand: cardinal, archbishop, lord chancellor, Wolsey was a formidable broker of power. And it also bought the services of a clever (and therefore expensive) attorney. This was Thomas Cromwell, who in early 1519 went to Rome to make his client’s case at the pope’s court. He journeyed via Calais, was away on his mission for 26 weeks, and ...”

“... There will be many who will find it significant that Anne Whitmarsh, beginning a careful and detailed study of Simone de Beauvoir with a section called ‘Biographical Notes’, should make the first entry read, ‘1905 21 June: Jean-Paul Sartre born in Paris’, and the last: ‘1980: Death of Sartre’. There are those for whom Simone de Beauvoir is important only because of her association with Sartre ...”

“... lunatic. The writer believes that there are true words and false. His is an extreme case of what Anne Barton calls cratylism. The word comes from Plato’s dialogue, the Cratylus, which is all about the question of whether language is naturally rooted in reality or is merely arbitrary. Within the dialogue the character called Cratylus maintains the former ...”

“... Creon’s edict and bury the corpse. And so she does. When asked to deny the crime, she says, in Anne Carson’s 2012 translation of Sophocles: ‘I did the deed I do not deny it.’ She does not seek to justify her actions within the terms of Creon’s law: she negates the law by handing it back to him, intact – ‘If you call that law.’ Antigone later ...”