“... lynching, a hodgepodge of offences, large and small, against the niceties of racial domination: Henry Bedford lynched for ‘talking disrespectfully to a young white man’; Jesse Thornton for ‘addressing a white police officer without the title “mister”’; Malcom Wright for ‘yielding too little of the roadway to a white man as he passed in his ...”

“... process gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...”

“... Tempest (he referred to it as his ‘ars poetica’), by having Prospero define magic as ‘the power to enchant/That comes from disillusion’, but the poetry also appears to feel that disenchantment can itself be an illusion. The villanelle he gives to Miranda, ‘My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely,’ expresses this view:He kissed me awake, and no ...”

“... which straddled the Missouri line – set off another crisis. Lincoln’s political hero, Henry Clay of Kentucky, proposed to keep the Union intact by trading a free California for slave states elsewhere in the southwest and by tightening the laws forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves to the South. But in the summer of 1850 Clay left ...”

“... and inefficiency, with ministries, departments of state, royal commissions and so forth, power is still wielded in an arbitrary and personal manner. Every leading prince has his majlis, where ordinary citizens can meet him, take coffee and discuss their problems. But there are no corporate institutions or centres of ...”

“... pain has made us so inventive. As unhappiness shows no sign of disappearing – and its staying power makes us look more like fashion victims than truth-seekers in our quest for therapies – we would do better to think of our solutions as inevitably provisional and uncertain, instead of sneering at them. Our misgivings about the available treatments for ...”

“... that soften into sandy beiges or stiffen into metallic silvers, retaining a peculiar density, a power of resistance, and throwing up a veil which inhibits comprehension. Or perhaps the contradiction has to do with the tensions between the luminous and the monochrome, and with the grids of black-edged faceting that mount upwards in pyramidal ...”

“... the finest of his more orthodox novels, one again senses the existence of resources of purity and power, and also reserves of feeling that may be tragic or even religious. Given his freedom to make any person in the narrative speak not only for himself but for the narrator, he can make extraordinary statements without vouching for their truth to character; so ...”

“... marriage register, where she published fictitious banns between Jane Austen of Steventon and Henry Frederic Howard Fitzwilliam of London. A second entry announced the forthcoming nuptials of Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool and the same plain Jane Austen of Steventon. These entries show her practising for her future profession, as well as ...”

“... they see as a sterile political landscape, is an ersatz form of insight and fulfilment. Reading Henry James isn’t likely to put paid to QAnon, but like a good deed in a naughty world it shines a frail light on our unsavoury situation. No doubt it’s tough to be a middle-class liberal in today’s United States, but feeling forlorn should be understood ...”

“... the real interests of Germany. In today’s context, that means not aspiring to outdated Great Power status, but letting our own interests ... become a part of the development of European objectives.’ It seems to me, as somebody who watched both its beginning and its end, that the Ostpolitik was justified. It did not overthrow Communism, but it was not ...”

“... Dickens, and in two of the three novels under review. Making and spending money, means exercising power, shouldering responsibilities, taking risks – and, often, getting caught up in plots and conspiracies. The novelist, it might be said, is properly concerned with the rich, since it is they who are most able to control things and influence people. And ...”

“... deal with the major arrangements of a society in its (usually uneasy) dispositions of property and power, including control over reproduction. Elizabeth Bergen Brophy’s book is a response to the question which must have occurred to every reader of 18th-century novels: ‘Are the novels really at all like life at the time?’ Were there ‘real ...”

“... images of women lost in their reading, who knows what’s in their books? There’s seductive power in a woman who neither returns nor avoids your gaze, because she’s absent even as she’s present; but there’s envy as you look at her too, and longing for whatever hidden realm it is that she has access to, closed to those who can see only into the ...”

“... high as a room, requiring minutes to do multiplication, have worked? No one knows. Babbage’s son Henry built part of an Analytical Engine after his father’s death; for what the information is worth, it always tended to jam. Babbage did have some reason to be sensitive about government finance. The Difference Engine was funded to the tune of £17,000 under ...”