“... work of ‘one of the fair sex – not, perhaps, a very formidable opponent to the whole military power of Great Britain’. ‘I would not care to give pain to the highly respectable connections of this lady and to herself by placing her in the witness box,’ Butt went on, ‘but I ask the attorney-general, as a man of honour – and a man of honour I ...”

“... grows with every volume; whose supposed stature, let’s say, since even Durrell’s friend Henry Miller had his doubts about this character. ‘I never get the conviction that he was the great writer you wish him to seem.’ I don’t think this shortfall weakens the Quartet as much as it might, since we are not required to believe in Pursewarden’s ...”

“... like Chandler, the heroine muses in a Woolfian fugue and so on (the veteran translator Michael Henry Heim was in action here). This time, Canongate has reproduced her polyphony of registers by commissioning three translators to work on the different parts of the book and give the memoir, fiction and essay a different feel. Ugrešić studied in Moscow in ...”

“... generals, or at least those who were not too busy checkmating one another in their struggles for power and status at Rome. Finally, in 63 BCE, his luck ran out. Age had taken its toll. Nearly 70 years old, no longer the young Alexander of his coins and his portraits, Mithridates had long since lost his aura of invincibility. Stranded in the Crimea, the ...”

“... and an intense sympathy for other people’s suffering. This, for Tye, is what gives such power to the question of what might have been. The ‘liberal icon’ of the book’s subtitle was in actuality not confined by liberalism; on the contrary, Tye argues, Kennedy’s extraordinary appeal in his final years lay precisely in his ability to bridge ...”

“... Morgan reinforces the critical revisionist work of other Marxist scholars such as Paul Bew and Henry Patterson, particularly the latter’s Class Conflict and Sectarianism (1980). The basic defect in Connolly’s approach was, as David Howell, too, has argued, that it assumed that the idea of an Irish national identity was unproblematic. Connolly never ...”

“... the honest and therefore unrepentant ones, came under suspicion. Even Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, who resigned from the Cabinet in protest at Truman’s Cold War foreign policy, was investigated by the HUAC. The special virulence reserved for Robeson was either motivated by, or justified in terms of, his Paris (and later) claim that blacks ...”

“... But the double story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is material for an Emily Brontë or a Henry James, a great ghost story with the roles of haunter and haunted, villain and victim, hopelessly entwined. This Gothic tale, Rose demonstrates, ‘seems to have the power to draw everybody who approaches it into its ...”

“... are thereby reduced to objects of desire.’ But: ‘To condemn altogether the applied erotic power of the female body entails denying an aspect of the human condition; the task we have to take up, as women who inhabit these centres of energy and as men who respond to their charge, is how to tap it and make it fructify.’ So that’s the task, as you ...”

“... sovereignty which in any case Calvin never wanted for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and ...”

“... of organised religion, he recently wrote: ‘For a century there has been no counterforce to power and commerce, nothing to say that the existence of the individual and of the world, their relationships, that between individuals, and activities that signify these, such as art, are not a matter of business and are not to be bought and sold.’ So what ...”

“... law as ‘trust’ indicates. Indeed, Stone is obliged to make at least a passing reference to Henry Ford and the Taylor of ‘scientific management’. Yet the USA does not figure in his admittedly brief account of the process of business concentration, and one would not guess from his lines on the development of the European automobile industry that it ...”

“... journey, but ‘the path, even if indirect, was unmistakably marked out.’ In that same July Sir Henry Wilson, ‘the fire-eating Director of Military Operations’, made a visit on his own initiative to Paris, and entangled the Government further in the schemes taking shape for future British participation in war on the Continent. In ...”

“... to hoist the red flag over the ruins of capitalism. When he returned, in 1979, Mrs Thatcher was in power and social reaction in the air. As he looked around he realised, for the first time, that he was living in an old country. ‘I felt,’ he writes, ‘as though I had stumbled inadvertently into some sort of anthropological museum.’ What most fascinated ...”

“... she would have kept that door shut though a flaming roof crackled over her head. I alone had the power to make her open that lock. In turning the key she put more trust in me than she ever did in God, and in that fateful moment I believed I was godlike – all-wise, judicious, benevolent and rational. We were both wrong: she who put her faith in me, and I ...”