“... able to imagine, a tale of moral and psychological harrowings which only a writer of considerable powers, both of patience and invention, could risk or pull off. This novel has been ‘anxiously mediated’, in Conrad’s phrase, and patches of its careful prose feel as if they may have been polished once or twice too often, as in ‘there were larks and ...”

“... characteristics, Carpenter outlined his vision. The Uranians, of mixed sexual type and prophetic powers, would initiate ‘a new chivalry’. Women would be rescued from the tombs of orthodox division of labour, bourgeois sexuality overthrown, and a true ‘inner’ democracy would flourish. Nietzsche was now welcomed, as a ‘healthy reaction’ to ...”

“... judges recommended a tariff of 15 years; the Home Secretary imposed a sentence of 20. In 1995, Michael Howard explicitly referred to the quasi-judicial nature of his role: ‘The prisoner is aware of the judicial view and has the opportunity to make representations. He is then told of the tariff set. If there is any departure from the judicial advice, he ...”

“... from which Ricks takes the title of his volume. Johnson speaks of ‘that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter’. The essay on Gower starts by propounding one of those popular critical problems which have little bearing on the ordinary reader’s enjoyment of literature: are an author’s effects ‘the ...”

“... of these – it is evident that the two parties arose simultaneously. They have not shown equal powers of survival. Whiggery has long disappeared, though 20th-century Conservatives have included a few Whiggish eccentrics. The Liberal Party of David Steel bears little resemblance to it, except in some residual link with religious dissent and the geographical ...”

“... of alien oppression now triumphantly shrugged off. Nor in practice have those current Great Powers which are still in essence imperial found coming to terms with empire difficult. China, for instance, continues to retain territories that were conquered by Chinese emperors long after the Spanish and Portuguese invasions of the New World, and does not ...”

“... as such in Entick v. Carrington. They are, however, compelling arguments in favour of limited powers, restrained in the manner of their exercise and capable of being deployed only after the most testing form of authorisation. State powers of surveillance are exercisable against the innocent as well as the guilty and are ...”

“... Some writers discover their powers gradually. Others – Anne Carson, for example – spring from the head of Zeus. With three books in four years during the mid-1990s, the Canadian poet, classical scholar, essayist and translator became suddenly prominent in North America; she had found readers in Britain as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T ...”

“... state – Oliver Cromwell – who was to be not a figurehead but a chief executive whose emergency powers of taxation were to be subject to Parliament’s endorsement or override, and who was forbidden to suspend or dispense with its legislation: ‘The laws shall not be altered, suspended, abrogated or repealed, nor any new law made, nor any tax, charge or ...”

“... often you read them; it remains the incantation of a murderer, dishevelled and fumbling among the powers of darkness.It is an act of alert critical reading to spot the action word among the proliferating concepts; and generous to suggest that Macbeth, crazed and ambitious as he is, even as he contemplates the killing of his king, can still represent a more ...”

“... said to have a ‘Balzacian eye’, and Balzac is elsewhere called a ‘prodigy of observational powers’. A love nest is called the Villa Balzac, an intricate, critical irony because the owner of the house is a ‘great fantasist’ far from fully aware of what he is doing when he adopts the great realist as his ‘patron saint’. The book itself, I ...”

“... the loss of its imperial role, by its industrial decline compared to other major – and minor – powers, and by the failure of the nostrums prescribed by alternating governments, meets most of the textbook requirements for the growth of extremism. Some profess to see in the monetarist takeover of the Conservative Party, or in the Labour Party’s lurch to ...”

“... the Government’s manifestly untenable case. The story starts with the Import, Export and Customs Powers (Defence) Act 1939, the casual misuse of which is characteristic of government conduct as evidenced throughout the Report. Before this Act, control of the export of goods out of Britain was governed by the royal prerogative and the common law. The Second ...”

“... judicial with the legislative function. The easy answer is to be serious about the separation of powers, but the separation of powers is and always has been a myth – that is, a useful but untrue account of things. The Georgian England in which Montesquieu claimed, for his own good reasons, to have observed and admired it ...”

“... charitably known as jargon. On this view, to be lucid is to make one’s peace with the prevailing powers. It is to speak a commodified language, even though in Marx’s opinion there are few more enigmatic phenomena than the commodity form. The clear is confused with the plain. It is perhaps significant in this respect that the very readable Felski, though a ...”