“... are. We don’t own them, nor do they own us: we are simply attached to them. Because of the ‘power of the transvestite to unsettle assumptions, structures and hierarchies’, the transvestite ‘tells the truth about gender’. Anti-essentialists like Garber, of course, cannot help occasionally falling back into the old language but what distinguishes ...”

“... who was perhaps one of the hundred recipients of the 1906 private edition of The Education of Henry Adams, and wrote while still under the spell of that monument to historical scepticism, describes the ‘truths’ of record (journalism, documents and photographs) as treacherous and unreliable. His friend Eastman had, in the novel proper, a penchant for ...”

“... screen set up to curtain off death’), just as it has no relation to the true necessities of power and love. Sabina is wholly accurate in her perception of the relation between kitsch and Communism: what she loathes and fears is not Communist ‘reality’ – persecution, meat queues, overcrowding, everlasting suspicion and shabbiness, all of which is ...”

“... with its powerful southern neighbour, since the proposition is definitely not true in 1707. Was Henry VII’s judgment that ‘the greater will draw the lesser’ entirely accurate? There were times during this period, notably 1641, when it looked as if the lesser might end up drawing the greater. The union of multiple kingdoms was one of the big ...”

“... him as much as new. ‘Hamilton was fascinated by the skill, the virtuosity and the outrageous power of the command of language that gave Joyce the freedom to employ every trick of his trade with a confidence that could absorb parody and pastiche into the poetic flow of words,’ Phillip Spectre (we’ll get to him later) tells us. ‘The question that ...”

“... a clean house’. Even today, I’m sure, my mother sees housekeeping as the domain of her power not her subjugation. Such feelings have tangled roots in British life. When, on 21 December 1988, a Pan Am plane exploded over Lockerbie, about ninety miles from where we lived, clothes and burst suitcases were scattered over the countryside. The local ...”

“... with whom the British had to negotiate: the early behaviour of the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, and his chief negotiator, Harry Dexter White, make grim reading. Keynes believed, as did most of the British delegation, that Britain had made an utterly disproportionate sacrifice in a joint cause: that she had fought America’s war for two ...”

“... and Johnson/Cory’s verdict stuck. No other prime minister in British history has surrendered power quite so limply, none more ignominiously except Anthony Eden after Suez.Like Eden, Rosebery was a golden boy (both were made foreign secretary at the age of 38). Adoring crowds followed him throughout his career. Leo McKinstry in this excellent new ...”

“... Gerhardie finds no place in syllabuses which find room for, say, Vonnegut or Doris Lessing. Since Henry Green, arguably the best English novelist of his time, is little better off, we need not waste our time being surprised at this neglect. It would be agreeable to believe that the present stir of interest might alter the situation: but the rather freakish ...”

“... so many of which were published at about the same time as Testament of Youth. The real power of the myth was psychological, deriving from the particular way in which British losses had been registered on the national consciousness. The first and heaviest blows had fallen on the Regular Army, which suffered casualties of more than 50 per cent in the ...”

“... revealed Gelli’s friendship with all sorts of powerful international figures: the inevitable Henry Kissinger, Mr Moon, Vice-President Bush and the President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara. More serious was the realisation that the antique-dealer, Deverini, who was accused of having helped Gelli to enter Monaco illegally, had earlier been accused of ...”

“... with truly regal generosity to those many unfortunates huddled at the opposite end of the wealth, power and status spectrum. But there was more to this mangered and magical moment than supererogatory royal beneficence. Even in the cosy, impromptu confines of the Christmas stable, the gift relationship was more subtle, complex and ambiguous. For there was also ...”

“... Its pages contain in embryonic form a theory of Scottish culture which, when developed, has the power radically to reshape English Studies and to make sense of post-Enlightenment Scottish literature by tying it into the wider Scottish cultural tradition that produced thinkers like Hume and Smith, as well as later tech nological achievements such as the ...”

“... Melba in a Paris street and asked her for money, she gave him what she had in her purse. But Henry James’s friend Morton Fullerton made a more typical response – he must have written this letter with Shakespeare’s play open on his desk: I am distressed to have left your touching appeal unanswered for so long. But I have been on congé in the ...”

“... that was to have enormous consequences: he renounced the fictional space and limited the dramatic power of painting; what remained suitable for an easel picture and was to be expected on the stage was not suited to the mural. During the same period the new Houses of Parliament in London were being decorated with murals by a group of leading British painters ...”