“... irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and power and character is at least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives is in opposite ...”

“... one of these performances can attest, they were remarkable – his detractors found his rhetorical power frightening, even Hitlerian. Invariably those, like Hailsham, who challenged him head on found themselves worsted. When Tony Benn attempted to affix the ‘Dachau and Belsen’ label to Powell’s speeches on immigration in 1970, Powell snatched the ...”

“... and Charles I was slow to follow Bacon’s advice that favourites must be allowed to fall from power to prevent political damage to the king himself – too slow to save his own head. Yet another role for the favourite, or privado, was that of reformer, for the creaking wheels of early modern administration, and especially the financial wheels, cried out ...”

“... prepped him at his interview in New York: ‘If poor and working-class people want to build real power, they have to have some sort of institutional base. With the unions in the shape they’re in, the churches are the only game in town.’ In Chicago, a black pastor extolled the church as ‘an example of segregation’s hidden blessings’: … the way it ...”

“... my visit to Frank I went with friends to visit the grave of the Anglo-Welsh Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan. We read aloud a passage from Vaughan’s ‘great poem’, as Frank rightly called it, ‘The Night’, a great and quite a cryptic poem. The passage was discussed by him in a sermon, learned, lucid, by no means arcane, one of his finest ...”

“... this so sharply, and to experience it as intense pleasure, to know limitation as release and power, was outside Mrs Smith’s pattern. She had probably been solicited by such aesthetic longings before. And rejected them. Why else be so afraid of the bright books?This is the moment when the needle’s eye opens wider than a gate, and writing – the kind ...”

“... Syndrome and ‘Saddam Hussein’s ass’ signalled the removal of all restraints on American power imposed by dogged gooks and their traitorous allies on the American left. With America free to police the world, old legal and moral barriers were also dismantled at home. Just as Coates entered Howard University and began his harsh education in American ...”

“... the ‘deeper’ structures of patriarchy – the system by which men manage to perpetuate their power by transmitting wealth from one generation to the next. The aim of the law, as Staves interprets it, is to ensure that women have as little independent control as possible of the wealth that passes through them. As the doctrine of coverture might ...”

“... allocates to politics the role of ensuring that the conditions of public life (the distribution of power and wealth, the protection of individual rights) are such as to allow individuals the best opportunities to pursue a life of private personal encounter, in which life alone human fulfilment lies. It thus reconciles (or defends the inconsistency between) the ...”

“... prolific author, attributed the invention of this novel ‘driving club’ to the Scottish amateur Henry Lamb. Its aim, Hutchinson added, was the ‘prevention of error’. ‘The face of the head is convex,’ Gibson tells Adams, ‘and it matters not whether you heel or toe a ball, they always go straight.’ He has never used one himself, he adds, reasoning ...”

“... old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers. His indictments of Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton have been among the glories of the prosecuting counsel’s art in recent years. Taking the global village as his courtroom, Hitchens asks us, the jury, to stare with wonder and loathing at these singular specimens ...”

“... the period, many of London’s propertied classes seem to have believed, however grudgingly, that power was passing back to the Stuart dynasty. The artificial legitimacy of the post-1688 monarchy had melted and even London’s Whig merchants and financiers accepted that the coronation of Charles III was imminent. Regime change was apparently confirmed by the ...”

“... my ladies-in-waiting in a damp castle in the North of England, depressed and stripped of all my power, with only memories to treasure. Unlike Nancy Mitford, however, I was too sad and too regal to masturbate.Since her death in 1587, Mary Stuart has caused strange stirrings and vehement imaginings in those who have applied themselves to her case. In ...”

“... Only so much adjustment of personal mental maps, as well as the wider geography of Britain’s power, can be expected even from those whose minds tend towards the tougher end of the spectrum of synapses.’ He ends the book by saying that ‘the country should have felt a greater sense of urgency about its relative economic performance, its place in Europe ...”

“... White House. Losing its virulent Jim Crow edge at home, the white South has acceded to national power. Conservatives who once opposed the end of legal segregation on the grounds that laws could not change hearts now pretend to believe that formal equality has wiped out the social inequalities built up over centuries. Their slogan of colour-blindness masks ...”