“... denounced him as a terrorist. The headline on the front page of Potere Operaio (‘Workers’ Power’) announced: ‘A Revolutionary Has Fallen’. Carlo Feltrinelli’s book is an attempt to explain how his father, a member of one of the richest families in Italy, ended up in that field, next to that pylon; but Carlo was ten when his father died, and it ...”

“... class of gentlemen as filled Parliament as to be untroubled by its obligation to obey the civil power. Other countries with more uppity armies have been troubled in this respect. Even today it can be risky in some Latin American states, as also in Turkey, to be thought to impugn the ‘honour’ of the army. And nearer home, in Spain, we recently witnessed ...”

“... and the Russian Revolution (‘The great thing is to keep the Russian infection, its decomposing power, from the social organism of the rest of the world’). There are only two surviving letters to Borys from what must surely have been hundreds. There are cheery notes to his wife as she spends yet another spell in hospital. But the nature of their intimate ...”

“... novella – this is plausible enough, to Hustvedt’s credit. Her plots depend on the occult power of art and the frailty of our ordinary healthy relation to the world. Sex plays its part in both. What I Loved deals in the lives of critics, painters, academics, writers: people who possess what has been called the leisure of the theory classes. It’s ...”

“... never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end of my long connection with Jamaica? Stuart left the island in 1951, making a ...”

“... a war correspondent, an honorary Frenchwoman, a gardener; and at the height of her earning power, the proceeds from her books far exceeded the income she had inherited. Despite the substantial comfort into which she was born – or because of it – there is considerable truth in a friend’s joke that both Teddy Roosevelt and Edith Wharton were ...”

“... he argued, would allow patients to ‘take up speech’ and achieve a sense of collective power: they would go from being ‘subjugated groups’ to ‘subject groups’; the authority of the analyst would be thrown into question. After May 1968, when he’d ridden to the barricades on a motorcycle at four in the morning and then rushed back to La ...”

“... as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ he told Henry Morgenthau, his treasury secretary and a close friend. ‘Which hand am I, Mr President?’ Morgenthau asked. ‘My right hand,’ he replied, ‘but I keep my left hand under the table.’ Roosevelt’s presidency is superbly documented, yet the modern ...”

“... bad what I think good?Noe, I am that I am ...This is in a way a very difficult poem because highly Henry-Jamesian. The point it makes is the dangerous power of imaginative sympathy, in poetry as in love – the poet becomes what his readers’ presuppositions make them make him. Yet inside its opacity (exactly as with ...”

“... machines, like Lemmon as C.C. Baxter. The secretaries lived inside a bubble of closeness to power, looking to burst through it into management or marriage, most likely the latter, geishas at work whose most realistic hope was to become domestic geishas, while the typists (originally called typewriters) and number-crunchers clattering on their machines ...”

“... where they constituted a majority of voters. But for a short period they wielded sufficient power in substantial parts of the South to insist on the establishment of public education, laws relatively favourable to workers, debtors and tenants, and prohibitions against various sorts of racial discrimination.Reconstruction’s most durable and ...”

“... to mind, but the Napoleonic Penal Code made similar provision. During the Spanish Inquisition, as Henry Kamen writes, ‘there was no need to rely on a secret police system, because the population as a whole was encouraged to recognise the enemy within the gates.’ The tradition of denunciation as civic virtue was reinvented in the French Revolution, when ...”

“... 1858. Theoretically, no professing Jew could vote because returning officers at elections had the power to demand the swearing of a Christian Oath of Abjuration by all prospective voters at the polls. The law on this subject was not changed until 1835, after which time voters were not required to take any oath before voting. Yet even before that there were ...”

“... 1933, when the President of the World Zionist Organisation came to Dublin, de Valera, who was in power, promised to have the issue of Jewish settlers in Palestine raised at the League of Nations. But there was always a difficult undertow. Among de Valera’s greatest supporters was Robert Briscoe, a Jew who later became Lord Mayor of Dublin (as did his son ...”

“... in which the author vanishes into the text and the text is decomposed into the several acts of power discerned by an omniscient if self-destructive reader. However deep the tensions and contradictions which O’Brien finds in the ‘melody’, he finds them also in Burke; and it is a consequence that they existed because of the complexities of ...”