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“... Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) set out to increase American purchasing power by getting the unemployed back to work. For the most part they planted forests, graded roads and developed outdoorsy holiday resorts, but the WPA also recruited 40,000 writers, theatrical workers, musicians and artists, most of them on relief, to work on ...”

“... of an earlier age, seeing in such dress a confident symbol of masculine sexuality and pride? Anne Hollander, who died in 2014, was the Ernst Gombrich of fashion history and tackled this question head-on in a confident survey of the field first published in 1994. Her text is full of provocations, in particular the idea that women’s fashion has ...”

“... Before the strike, the country was characterised by comparative egalitarianism, the (relative) power and legitimacy of organised labour, and an industrial economy in which state industries played a prominent role. After it, economic inequality skyrocketed and the trade unions were delegitimised, politically and legally, losing members and ...”

“... name would not fall into discredit. The story is typical of the dozens of anecdotes that enliven Anne Goldgar’s erudite, provocative and sometimes problematic book. It takes place in a peculiarly fascinating setting, the world of the French Protestant intellectuals who went into exile throughout Europe after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in ...”

“... there was an unspoken subtext to the words and the pictures which contributed to their haunting power: the unacknowledged narcissism of the subject. Anoretics – the correct medical term for the anorexia-sufferer, on which Hornbacher insists – are typically high achievers and perfectionists; they tend to be proud of their ability to get thinner than ...”

“... Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind’: it would be hard to devise a more off-putting title for Gillian Sutherland’s sympathetic account of the Clough family. It’s slightly misleading too, because her book is not much concerned with religious faith. The history it presents is shaped by faltering Christian conviction among the liberal elites of the 19th century, and the pursuit of justice and progress that survived Christianity’s decline ...”

“... up for her session there was no answer to the doorbell. Later, she learned that her therapist, Anne Darquier, had killed herself. She did so not long after a television interviewer had discovered Louis Darquier de Pellepoix living in Franco’s Spain, unrepentant, even smug. That revelation, that her therapist was this monster’s daughter, whom he had ...”

“... in their own national elections the same year. The difference was that Hitler used the coercive power of the state to secure an artificially high turnout (99 per cent of the German electorate was reported as having voted) whereas the Democrats used coercion to keep the turnout low. The population of Mississippi in the late 1930s was more than two ...”

“... stands the Coronation Chair, and in that combination of relics and royalty, sacred and secular power, lies the whole meaning of the Abbey. It is also the subject matter of Paul Binski’s subtle, learned and absorbing book. The origins of the Abbey – to be precise, the Collegiate Church of St Peter in Westminster – are shrouded in uncertainty. A Saxon ...”

“... popular movements in Eastern and Central Europe. Garlanded with encomia from Timothy Garton Ash, Anne Applebaum and Niall Ferguson, the book includes a formidable assemblage of supporting documentation. It contains eight pages of ‘biographical sketches’ of people mentioned in the text; a three-page chronology of the scattered reigns and destinies of a ...”

“... were far stronger than his occasional grudging acceptance of a community of interest. With Anne came the King’s doctor William Butts, ‘whose unobtrusive services to the evangelical cause played a key part in the course of Henrician reformation’. This Boleyn-Butts axis often appears in this book competing vigorously for limelight with Thomas ...”

“... entitlement limited to white people. Cowie argues that ‘white freedom’ has long entailed the power to dominate others, especially non-whites, without interference from the national government. The fear that white freedom is under assault by Blacks, or immigrants, or a faraway national government, helps to explain why in the last election Donald Trump ...”

“... of foreign nations, was a given.It had not always been so. When Lenin’s Bolshevik Party took power in Russia in October 1917, it had an abundance of sophisticated, polyglot members, whose years in European exile had made them conversant in several European languages. These former émigrés – including Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin (in ...”

“... The cycle, ‘Give Me Back My Rags’, personifies the unknown joker and attempts to exorcise his power. The speaker of the poem refuses to play the game: Damn your root and blood and crown And everything in life The thirsty pictures in your brain The fire-eyes on your fingertips And every every step To three cauldrons of cross-grained water Three ...”

“... the Lacan circus had had to migrate across town, from its original medical setting in the Sainte-Anne hospital, via the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the Rue d’Ulm, to a lecture-room lent by the law faculty of the Sorbonne; and Lacan the determined misfit has an amused commentary to offer on the reasons for these enforced displacements. At Sainte-...”