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“... the conversation, of which, in fact, there was little. By this time, anyway, Ehrenburg’s immense power to pull the strings of cultural life had devolved on his French-born secretary, Natalya Stolyarova. She had become the facilitator, the person to see for appointments, assurance that this or that coast was clear, permission to read this and that, and so ...”

“... life, much of it previously hidden. ‘Access to privacy,’ she notes, ‘was an index of power.’ Her examining of records from the Old Bailey brings to light the formerly blanked-out domestic detail of rough lodging houses and servants’ quarters. The testimonies offered in cases of breaking and entering tell of scant furnishings and pathetic ...”

“... fringes of the City of London, is an arresting motto: E Pulvere Lux Et Vis. The ‘light’ and ‘power’ were electrical; the ‘dust’ that was burned to generate them was the refuse from the surrounding streets. Twenty thousand tons of this fuel, most of it horse dung, was gathered locally every year. Incinerating waste and making electricity were ...”

“... RA, ‘but true art needs no incentive; its work is its own reward.’ Annie Swynnerton was born Anne Louisa Robinson in Manchester in 1844, one of the four daughters of a legal clerk and his wife. She went to Manchester Art School in 1871, as did her sisters Emily and Julia, where they were all prize-winning students, though frustrated by the scope of the ...”

“... of all the oppressed’ and a liberal tradition of 19th century British missionary culture. Jo-Anne Collinge, a journalist on the Johannesburg Weekly Mail, has criticised the book for ‘the blandness which results from faithfulness to the idea of letting participants tell the story’. This is a polite way of saying that the author has failed to provide a ...”

“... that we are bound by our social origins to what he calls aesthetic dispositions and have little power to choose otherwise.Denise is a perfect example of Bourdieu’s thesis. As she grows up, she becomes alienated from what Ernaux calls ‘the real’. Or rather, the real of her childhood disappears under the onslaught of the real of school, for which she ...”

“... now editor of the Scotsman, understood his talent and also knew the dangers. Francis avoided power, but he somehow had it anyway, Without, as Linklater put it, ‘lifting a finger’, he managed to subvert the sacrosanct rules of newspaper publishing. The Magazine’s reputation on the newspaper for being frivolous, self-absorbed, anarchic, using acres ...”

“... the thing we would prefer him not to do, and does it bravely. Fewer tears are shed by the women in Anne Sebba’s admirable book. ‘You can’t betray the strains you are under,’ says Patricia Clough of the Independent, and much of this book is about the pressures of operating in a world where men have liked to have one set of rules for themselves and ...”

“... book, Elizabethan Life in Town and Country (1925), and editor of Henry VIII’s love letters to Anne Boleyn (1936), was beavering away, sorting, transcribing, annotating thousands of letters exchanged between Lord Lisle, his wife Honor, their agents in London, and leading members of the Henrician court and political circles. If it seemed that there was ...”

“... as The Mad and the Bad, extended this sense of the world as a closed circle of violence and power. A young woman and a boy, Julie and Peter, attacked by mysterious assailants, have to run for their lives: a classic noir plot (a lover of jazz, Manchette likes to riff on the standards). He switches pace between scenes, speeding up the action until it’s ...”

“... for subplots worthy of Trollope or Dickens, usually hingeing on sex, class or institutional power, or sometimes all three at once. ‘I must say I do have a sneaking guilty hankering for dominant males myself,’ Cooper wrote in 1977, and nothing much seems to have changed since then as far as the main thrust of her fiction goes. The best-known figure ...”

“... attachment to models was stronger than it was in the more pragmatic UK, Conquest’s first book, Power and Policy in the USSR (1961), ran into some criticism on these grounds. Thereafter, a tinge of mutual scepticism and condescension informed his relationship with academia, despite the coincidence of Cold War views between Conquest and most academic ...”

“... Anne Barton​ delivered the lectures on ‘The Shakespearean Forest’ that form the basis for this, her much anticipated last book, in Cambridge in 2003. The Clark Lectures were themselves the product of an extended reflection on the significance of Shakespeare’s imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays ...”

“... he created the kingdom of Angria, and roped Charlotte into writing chronicles about it. Emily and Anne, distressed by the macho militarism of Branwell’s fables, created the more peaceable kingdom of Gondal in a separatist gesture. The hero of the Angrian myths is Alexander Percy, anarchist and aristocrat, a Branwell in everything but the dope, spinelessness ...”

“... on occasion (and occasionally is) since there is not the faintest doubt of its virility, its power (for as long or short as is desired) to capture and absorb its public. Television is not on the way to destroying fiction (which is what much of it is), it is only going to shove writing, ‘style’, a little further back into the darkness where, one ...”