“... against the barbarities of Zhdanov but equally to be wielded against Hollywood, advertising and Henry Luce. Even the post-war Partisan Review symposium ‘Our Country and Our Culture’, which in 1952 elected to celebrate, as the use of the possessive might indicate, a more rounded and reconciled view of America on the part of the intellectuals, was shot ...”

“... of youth and demands action ‘now’. He calls for the victory of a party of ‘class political power’ – something in which he continued to believe long after the CP had ceased to do so. Scargill gives various accounts of why he left the Party – and forged ahead – including one which has him opposing the eviction of Stalin’s body from the Lenin ...”

“... so by emphasising the usual ability of language to embody them, makes that ability into a positive power. ‘Jabberwocky’ emphasises it by inventing its own words as it goes along, to demonstrate how completely and finally they then make up the tale. It parodies the charged language of poetry – particularly romantic poetry – in which the force of ...”

“... fade, and concede some of its identity to its neighbours, before, in 1951, taking herself off the power map altogether by emigrating to Brazil for 15 years. Where once she had traded on absence and alienation – ‘the sea, desperate,/will proffer wave after wave’ or ‘And I shall sell you sell you/sell you of course, my dear, and you’ll sell ...”

“... bombast’, but his question is central to Insurgent Empire: ‘How can the case against imperial power be made?’ – and made from the metropole. As Gopal makes clear, the story of British anti-imperial dissent she has recovered is a ‘minority tradition’. It rarely triumphed either as a matter of public opinion or imperial policy. She doesn’t give a ...”

“... to ‘you’, as though the poet were reaching past his lover to us. I was reminded of the power of this passage, in all its strange tactility, by Valentine Cunningham’s too brief discussion of it at the climax of Reading after Theory. For the most part his book is a polemical but unsurprising survey of the strengths and drawbacks of Theory as it has ...”

“... a fiction designed to mask a satire on what it was like to be a courtier in the later reign of Henry VIII – an experience which, for want of a better term, could be described as ‘grim’?This is an extreme version of a problem that arises with many ‘folk’ tales, and indeed with many stories which present themselves as anonymously authored, or which ...”

“... to the Chinese Communist Party. Sankar regularly denounces the Pentagon’s ‘monopsony’ power, the ‘deep state’ and the dominance of the ‘primes’ – the five major aerospace and electronics contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics – which he characterises as lumbering giants holding back the US ...”

“... of Leavis’s, have an oddly bureaucratic sound, but it is an accurate description of a power that Shakespeare developed, occasionally almost over-developed, in the plays after Hamlet. Any admirer could multiply instances, memorable insights and formulations achieved almost, it seems, in passing. They do more than the more celebrated hostile ...”

“... lacks even a pauper’s grave – a departure from the more usual fantasies of Jewish commercial power. The trope appears again in the notorious lines in ‘Gerontion’: And the jew squats in the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. In the pre-1963 editions of the poem, the ...”

“... with it. We couldn’t make a life. We couldn’t give up the love, but we wouldn’t bend to its power. These are large questions, but McEwan has an eye for small ones too. ‘I thought even you were above this kind of new-age drivel,’ the narrator of Enduring Love says in the middle of an argument, and is surprised at his sudden mastery of the ugly ...”

“... mechanics who could deliver such goods were worth. If theoretical knowledge was not necessarily power, the King knew that skill of this sort surely was. By the mid-1670s, Hooke’s fertile mind and dextrous hands had already produced a stream of real and advertised inventions that promised to transform the practice of a range of sciences, the technologies ...”

“... writes, ‘but an automobile which … is capable of converting its horizontal speed into the power of ascent.’ When Bergotte became a writer, the ‘simple machine’ bequeathed to him by his family acquired this power; wittier or more refined friends ‘might return home in their fine Rolls-Royces, showing a certain ...”

“... to the paintings of Ad Reinhardt, Rothko and Matisse. At the same time, the catalogue stresses power and money: ‘To acquire an Armani suit has become a right [sic] of passage, a symbol of success sought or won.’ Judith Thurman, who reviewed the show for the New Yorker, thinks, however, that Armani is passé and that the exhibition denotes his ...”

“... in the ascendancy they exiled the pro-papal Black Guelphs, who returned the gesture on regaining power two years later. Dante, in Rome at the time on embassy to Boniface VIII, was exiled in absentia for alleged corruption and ordered to pay a hefty fine, which he couldn’t do because the Blacks had confiscated his assets. Soon afterwards the Florentines ...”