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“... Nell,​ the narrator of Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren, can’t imagine real words coming out of her boyfriend’s mouth. ‘When I think about him talking, all he says is: Bloke, bloke bloke bloke. Blokey bloking bloke, bloke-bloke bloking.’ The boyfriend in question, Felim, a tall, taciturn farmer’s son, built like ‘a plastic model of what-goes-where’, turns out to have an interest in choking and taking non-consensual photographs of women ...”

“... the sorting process has not been wholly automated. ‘Nothing beats the human eye,’ my guide, Anne, told me. Every batch of waste is first ferried past a team of pickers, who pull out anything that could jam or damage the machinery. (Anne proudly displayed a series of bent frying pans, metal rods and oil ...”

“... him to abandon or at least qualify his position. So, to substantiate his claim that Volumnia’s power over Coriolanus is the strongest force in his life, Nuttall can write: ‘In III 2 Volumnia tries in vain to get Coriolanus to sue for office and only succeeds when she gives up rational persuasion and instead remarks – quite lightly – that she will be ...”

“... that human minds were born as if they were blank sheets of paper was the unleashing of the power to shape their own lives.’ You could shape the lives of others, too, particularly your children, by manipulating the influences upon the nerves and brain for good results; it was the 18th century’s belief in the sensibility, the sensitive consciousness ...”

“... accounts and fretting over her taxes. Part of her point is to show how Wharton acquired power in an era when women were not officially supposed to have it. She does not, however, create a bridge between the social-financial Wharton and the artist for whose sake we are interested in the society lady with the formidable wealth. The reader of ...”

“... in making it serve her. Her defiant and open Irishness proclaims her right to hold aloof from the power structure that has not done well by her. She is not to be deluded by the power structure at work in Ireland, the panoply of viceroys, judges and bishops and the whole pompous settlement. What England has done to Ireland ...”

“... contributed, at their genesis in the emerging technologies of his time, to the transformative power of the cinema and the computer. In his person, technological genius was combined with commercial opportunism and a potential for myth-making to make him Solnit’s patron saint of California. Solnit wants us to see Muybridge as both prophet and apostle, as ...”

“... it might run something like this. Our capacity for imagination defines us as precisely as our power of speech. In order to be able to cope with tomorrow I have to create, today, however briefly, an image of the world I am about to enter. I have, of course, every reason to suppose that tomorrow will be much like today, and that all the few differences can ...”

“... 1950s – ‘Brancusi meets Giacometti meets Arp meets a ghostly family in a Dogon village,’ as Anne Wagner has put it – to the deliberately regressive work of the 1960s: muddy twists of plaster or latex, reminiscent of entrails, faeces or other bodily excrescences. These in turn led to the production of such icons of the informe as Fillette of about ...”

“... the party or movement that will take us there. So much is common ground to all three authors. But Anne Sassoon’s analysis focuses much more exclusively on this aspect than the others. Her difficulties with the elusive figure of il Principe moderno may reasonably be taken as typical of the whole approach. Machiavelli’s original ‘prince’ was a ...”

“... published in the early Sixties, another full-length study might need some justification. But Anne Taylor has compressed Besant’s inordinately eventful ‘lives’ into a managable book half the size of Nethercot and pulled the threads together into a single life. Both contemporaries and earlier biographers tended to divide Besant’s career into two ...”

“... politics in general. Surprisingly, Bernard deals hardly at all with the fall and execution of Anne Boleyn. Some have seen Anne’s active interest in evangelical religious reform, and in particular her concern that the proceeds of the dissolution of religious houses be invested for the public good, as having had ...”

“... According to God, ‘Man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil’ and their new power must be met with a matching difficulty. Adam is condemned to work the ground from which he was first taken. As for Eve, fake old Jerome curses her with a double dose of subservience ‘and thou shalt be under thy husband’s ...”

“... feast day on 6 January when women traditionally gathered to socialise without men. ‘There was power in the storm that escaped last night,/last night on Women’s Christmas/from the desolate madhouse behind the moon/and screamed through the sky at us, lunatic.’ The following week I couldn’t find, in four pages of book reviews, any discussion of a book ...”

“... in France six years ago under the title of Les Météores, but it arrives in this country, in Anne Carter’s convincing and sometimes virtuosic translation, with none of the trumpeting which announced his earlier triumphs, Friday and The Erl King. All his publishers have managed to come up with is an ambiguous commendation from Genet: ‘An ...”