“... doth so much abound), but also in mercy to grant unto me, by increase of faith, strength and power to make a good and Christian end. He forbade any of the ‘extraordinary ceremonies’ due to men who served in high places and was buried quietly in the same tomb as his son-in-law, Philip Sidney. Ironically, in much of the book Walsingham hovers off ...”

“... for all the privileged sons born into misery at the centre of intrigues of familiar wealth and power. There is a double edge to our attention to the unhappy rich. We are reassured to know that money doesn’t guarantee love and fulfilment; on the contrary, there is a sense that the proper trajectory for the unhappy rich is downward and tragic. Jane ...”

“... could rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel after only nine years in the army through purchasing power alone. Soldiers from the lower classes who were promoted from the ranks tended to receive commissions in regiments no one else wanted to join, often in the worst colonial garrisons – those with reputations for high rates of disease and death. ‘The ...”

“... thousand, was the first to sign because an instrument limiting war actually increased its relative power and promised peaceful revision of the hated treaty. Japan, however, believed it was merely making a ‘diplomatic gesture … affirming the aspiration of all civilised nations to seek peace’. Hathaway and Shapiro argue that none of this mattered. The ...”

“... will shrink: an individual will be able to enjoy only the most fleeting sense of autonomy and power at the moment of the mouse-click, before insecurity at work intrudes on his consciousness and deprives him of any innocence in the enjoyment of his triumph. It’s worth going through Reich’s argument in some detail, because at each stage he risks ...”

“... been misleadingly retitled The Drover’s Wife and Other Stories after Bail’s appropriation of Henry Lawson’s 1892 classic. Bail approaches Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ through Russell Drysdale’s well-known painting of the same name. In Lawson, the wife finds a strength of her own while maintaining a firm sense of connection with her absent ...”

“... encounters that helped Evans evolve his craft: his discovery through Engels of the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, his meeting with Seamus Delargy, Director of the Irish Folklore Commission, his work for Charles Parker in sound radio, in the Sixties. In this way, it is a companion volume to Strength of the Hills. He reflects on his craft, by exploring the ...”

“... she noted, since ‘a husband has in this country such particular rights and such great power over his wife’ – her subjects expressed related anxieties by composing ballads that put Victoria in trousers or the entire government in petticoats, or that speculated on the disorders that might follow a marriage initiated by the wrong sex. Since the ...”

“... one or two very minor solecisms about Eton – he seems to think it was founded by George III not Henry VI – his knowledge is extensive and his touch assured. With the exception of Bob Brand the members of the Cliveden Set tended to take themselves all too seriously. Rose does not take them on their own valuation, and in fine, economical, sometimes ...”

“... and Winifred Wagner travelled to Munich to witness the putsch that was supposed to bring Hitler to power, only to see it fail. Winifred in particular now worked harder than ever on behalf of the allegedly victimised and wrongly imprisoned Hitler. Her relationship with him in the ‘years of struggle’ before 1933 became easy and familiar, a rarity with ...”

“... coup and, in the summer of 1943, pulled the plug on the project. ‘For the new men who came to power in RKO it was all too easy to make this giant, scriptless documentary in South America look like a crazy waste of money,’ he would later recall. ‘A truly merciless campaign was launched, and by the time I came back to America my image as a capricious ...”

“... for a weapon to be used in this war, so in June 1947 Britain emerged as the world’s only nuclear power, and the gun-method uranium Bomb – nicknamed Fat Man (after the prime minister) – was successfully tested in Newfoundland. The British Bomb had seriously strained the alliance with the Americans, but there was no more a ‘special relationship’ with ...”

“... and dad./They may not mean to but they do’), I began to realise the flexibility as well as the power and memorability of good ‘formal’ verse. And when, after many months of cajoling, I got Tim to show me some of his own poems – he had not at the time published a book – I realised that it was possible for a poet of my own generation to write about ...”

“... of Revolution 1989 are about Hungary, about the Communist Party’s cunning retreat from its power monopoly, and the majestic funeral in June 1989 of Imre Nagy and his comrades, martyrs of the 1956 Revolution. He gets across the grotesque flavour of that occasion, the contrast between the grieving passion of the crowd and the calculating duplicity of the ...”

“... St Helena. Anderson was soon freed. This was, on any showing, an astonishing exercise of judicial power and authority. But it was not novel. Two and a half centuries earlier, in 1604, the Council in the Marches of Wales, an offshoot of the Privy Council, ordered its jailkeeper, Francis Hunnyngs, to confine Walter Witherley ‘in little ease’ for his ...”