“... who had won no Westminster seats, got eighteen MSPs. Nye Bevan said that ‘the purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away,’ but he didn’t mean like that. Torrance looks at some of the other strange inversions in Scottish Labour’s history. One of them is that the party was born out of radical Liberalism, and many of its founders’ lives ...”

“... It was said of the Soong sisters that Ailing loved money, Qingling loved China and Meiling loved power. Her marriage to Chiang in 1927 (his third, her first) was her path to the top. It came after the Kuomintang forces he led had fought their way from the south to the Yangtze in 1926-27 and were about to march on to defeat – or enter into an alliance with ...”

“... was to somehow ensure that the way the empire was wound up served the interests of the departing power. The new owners of Britain’s overseas properties had to be the right sort of people.’ But nothing could be ensured in Malaya unless the two main communities found a way to live together. The pieces of this deadlocked chess game were scattered by the ...”

“... earthly goods rather than heavenly ones was invoked to criticise rulers for holding on to worldly power and rebels for trying to snatch it from them. The Jew similarly came to embody greed: from Shakespeare, who in The Merchant of Venice expresses the early modern unease with commercialism, to Marx, who argues that the debate about emancipating Jews is futile ...”

“... owes much to Chaucer. Sir Epicure Mammon, already rich, yearns for more wealth and power (also sex and lost youth). Reflecting, perhaps, on the witchcraft trials and alleged demonic possessions that were dividing opinion at the time, the play allows for scepticism as well as credulity, and the inevitability of imposture. Like Chaucer’s ...”

“... of excellences, Baker singled out his celebratory precision. John Updike’s own father-figure was Henry Green. What he sought to emulate, however, was not just Green’s idiosyncratic lyricism but a social attentiveness, and a glancing access to characters’ interior spaces. The Updike whom Baker loves is a diminished artist, an Updike with the Green ...”

“... mental exploration as there was in Scotland seems to have been directed almost exclusively at the power politics of theocracy, except for a few eccentrics such as Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. Theocratic failure and national defeat took place before the first signs of intellectual innovation. The most interesting 17th-century forerunner of the 18th-century ...”

“... a forum for studying the way society was functioning and the assumptions it made: its attitudes to power and authority, to social interaction, to religious belief and to emerging scientific principles. This is a large claim, but Mesmerised is so fully illustrated and so well argued that it makes out a strong case. It is also a fine piece of cultural ...”

“... his long-harboured desire to follow in the footsteps of the great 19th-century Assyriologists: Henry Layard, Hormuzd Rassam, George Smith. Now in his mid-thirties, he is married but childless, and fast running out of money. His wife, Edith, who is with him in the Middle East, fell instantly in love with the fervour of his ambition on the evening they ...”

“... heroines, taking on the ‘lovely garnish of a boy’ as a survival strategy, and a bid for power: ‘Sometimes it’s just more practical … At some point we might need to supplement aspects of ourselves and, in the tradition of Shakespeare, blend the roles of girl and boy, man and woman, king and fool, queen and servant.’ One of the desperate acts ...”

“... which people slip in and out of their different roles, adapting and discarding their mantles of power (Chaudhuri imposes great burdens of meaning on his adverbs, and sometimes over-uses them), and announces the arrival of an insidious irony which creeps up on us as the passage unfolds, with ‘lecture’, ‘logic’ and ‘transcended’ each getting more ...”

“... names of which the Prime Minister, in practice, has to choose one). In terms of limiting No 10’s power of direct ecclesiastical patronage, that may have marked a watershed: but, in fact, the whole constitutional process had been subject to continual subtle modifications well before that. At the start, as Palmer’s narrative makes clear, Queen Victoria was ...”

“... in Cookham Churchyard in which the artist himself appears, along with his first wife Hilda and Sir Henry Slesser, later Solicitor-General in a Labour government. Since a wife has been mentioned, it is time to deal with sex and Stanley Spencer, a subject dwelt on in loving detail in a TV documentary two or three years back. In 1925 he married Hilda Canine. Like ...”

“... yakkety-yakkety-yak of iambic pentameter, and tacit agreement with his insistence on the poetic power of the image. The beliefs that plain or ornamented images are almost poems in themselves, that there are ‘no ideas but in things’, and hence no need even to consider the possible importance of a poetic metric, have led in the last two decades to a mass ...”

“... more sophisticated every day’: an aspect of this development was, no doubt, the growing power to distinguish Conrad from Conradese. Of all his work to date The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, published at the end of 1897, pleased him best – he called it his ‘beloved Nigger’. It was much liked by judges he respected, and might even appeal to the ...”