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“... that their bright colours represented ‘all the longings’ of ‘the colourless civilian man of power’. And it is true that the older style of masculinity seems to have been delegated to soldiers: they still killed, and still paraded, in colours. Yet it is powerful men, not dashing officers, that fictitious heroines find most sexually ...”

“... it ‘an unexpected, almost miraculous accord between abandon to the world and confidence in its power’. This phrase illuminates the role of ‘the world’ in the book’s title and the allusion to one of Satyajit Ray’s best-known films, The Home and the World. Daney is at his brilliant best when writing about Orson Welles, whose films ‘begin where ...”

“... herself, but his success came at a price: the nobility split into factions, provoking civil war. Power slipped into the hands of the nobles, whose alliances constantly shifted and who held the allegiance of the local retainers who provided the manpower for rival armies. York was killed at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460, but not before he’d marched into ...”

“... right-hand men. Among these lords were the Robertians, later known as the Capetians, whose power centred on Paris. Others included the counts of Flanders, Vermandois and Poitou, and the dukes of Aquitaine, Anjou, Burgundy and Normandy. All these families were connected by ties of marriage and bound by oaths of loyalty to the king, and their territories ...”

“... it put her next to someone with ‘a strong breath’. The chaplain to James I’s wife, Queen Anne, held that of ‘all the noisome scents, there is none so rammish and so intolerable as that which proceeds from man’s body … I will not speak of his filth issuing from his eares, his eyes, nostrils, mouth, navel, and the uncleane parts.’ Even Jacobean ...”

“... are laced with a sometimes murderous aggression. Almost all relationships in their world are power struggles, spiced from time to time with a sadistic delight in making others suffer and a masochistic drive to self-immolation. Charlotte’s Villette is full of such erotic perversities. Apart from Anne Brontë’s ...”

“... this commitment there was also a fantasy of the great imperial city, centre and symbol of power, especially commercial power, a city of display in which the outstanding commodity to be looked at was the city itself, often in the mirror of the World Exhibitions (one reason why Second Empire Paris has so often ...”

“... over the decades with the kind of infatuation adolescents have when they first discover the power of books. There is not a moment of dispassion to be found in her sentences on Tsvetaeva and Pasternak’s ‘impossible, glorious demands’ on each other and on Rilke, or in her praise of the courage of Anna Banti’s rewriting the lost manuscript of ...”

“... foreign prince, person, prelate, state or potentate hath or ought to have any jurisdiction, power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm’? Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, turned his fire on the archbishop of Canterbury: ‘I do feel that ...”

“... that she died of puerperal fever (her baby boy was one of two survivors from four births). Yet the power of Ward, Lock and Tyler’s phantom – a dim and disembodied entity, but vaguely middle-aged, matronly and strait-laced – still asserts itself. Those who have an urge to connect the life and the work sometimes make the mistake of looking up in the family ...”

“... in the plot. Ackroyd’s double-track narrative switches between London in the period of the Queen Anne churches (say 1714 to 1715, though the building process is telescoped) and the city of today. Across the divide of idiom and landscape, there is a parallelism of event: murders committed in identical places – around the site of Hawksmoor churches, in ...”

“... against the papal refusal to sanction his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn was to dethrone the pope as head of the church in England. In this he had the counsel of the ruthless and crafty Thomas Cromwell. More had in 1529 accepted the chancellorship left vacant by the impeachment of his patron Cardinal Wolsey, on condition ...”

“... this pre-emptive embrace of male pornography is, she thinks, an alarming way of asserting female power. Their behaviour is determined by the men they think they are free from. In The Days of Abandonment, Ferrante has cut the shocked reaction and eradicated all ambivalence – there are no multiple perspectives, no daughters imagining fathers imagining wives ...”

“... to Labour? Or in those seats with a high-minded middle class? Perhaps Oona King, Barbara Roche and Anne Campbell could ask him. (Indeed Oona King could ask herself what she thought was going to happen.) The prime minister’s self-indulgence should not be rewarded by another long spell in Downing Street. That is not the only thing to be said against his ...”

“... other sources – that British secret policemen did place themselves at the service of a foreign power in the attempt to destabilise an elected British government. Mr James Angleton may not have been – was not, in my opinion – as foul as the men of Dzerzhinsky Square. But the point of protesting about ‘moral equivalence’ is surely not to blur moral ...”