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“... of the mediocre short stories from which equally mediocre horror films have been made; and Michael Howell and Peter Ford’s The True History of the Elephant Man. The best of the lot is the last, a well-researched and level-headed biography that tells us considerably more about Joseph Merrick than we knew before. For example: Treves recorded that he ...”

“... in those years, in music and painting and philosophy and fiction and drama, extraordinary creative powers were released – the sense of release, of liberation, is exact. In the drama, for all the massive achievement of Ibsen, and the later innovations of a Chekhov, a Pirandello, a Brecht, Strindberg remains the single most original and powerful ...”

“... As the ‘intelligence war’ escalated, it was left to officers from MI6, in particular Michael Oatley, to find a more constructive approach, and he conducted secret back-channel talks with Catholic priests, the Derry businessman Brendan Duddy, and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin. After Mountbatten’s murder in August 1979 and the killing, hours ...”

“... commanding presentation suits a theatrical impulse that lies deep in Obama’s idea of his proper powers – an impulse he has always recognised, which, at most times in his life, he has taken great care to repress. One reward of David Maraniss’s biography of Obama’s first 27 years is that it confirms a hunch about Obama’s self-invention.* His vagabond ...”

“... had bred 2123 dogs and owned 2696.They are often like this, the ‘Doggy People’ who feature in Michael Worboys’s study of twenty ‘eminent and not so eminent Victorians who were the modern dog’s makers’: muscular, energetic, eccentric, polymathic. Kathleen Pelham-Clinton, the Duchess of Newcastle, who imported the borzoi breed from Russia into ...”

“... the ‘famous art’ – is magic. The play is part of the Renaissance debate about magic: its powers, its permissibility, its pitfalls. It poses the basic Elizabethan question about magic: liberation or damnation? There has been an upsurge of interest in Renaissance occultism recently, due partly to Jung’s interest in the psychodynamics of magic, and ...”

“... to the subsequent history of Ulster. Protestant hegemony was established by law (the Special Powers Act, 1922), force (mainly the B-Specials, resident in each locality) and the gerrymandering (here always ‘alleged’) of local government boundaries. But because Johnson conceives of developments in Northern Ireland in terms of an all-Irish history, he ...”

“... For the nationalism of the developing countries is increasingly directed not against the colonial powers of the imperial age, but against other countries and ethnic groups within the Third World itself. This is evident in the growing oppression of minorities in Third World countries, and in the growing number of wars between Third World states, of which that ...”

“... regimes have gone out of their way to discredit NGOs, representing them as the tools of external powers, and even (in Russia) insisting they declare themselves as ‘foreign agents’. Trump described as ‘paid-up activists’ the millions who came out against his proposed Muslim travel ban, and used the term again about critics of Brett Kavanaugh (for good ...”

“... that he hasn’t faced up to the problems of the central edifice itself. There is no separation of powers, there are far too many MPs, secrecy makes it much too easy to hoodwink Parliament and the public, the second chamber remains a patronage-based absurdity and so on. What makes the book so riveting to read is, on the one hand, the thoroughness of ...”

“... discipline within their walls, is absolute.’ This judgment remains the classic authority on the powers of Parliament over its members. And so on it went. Finally, years after being first elected, Bradlaugh was at last allowed to take his seat thanks to a cool and masterly coup by the speaker, Arthur Wellesley Peel, Sir Robert’s youngest son. No sooner had ...”

“... At its best, the LCC was an outstandingly well-run local authority, administering wide statutory powers for the benefit of Londoners. Morrison did much to create it and to ensure that his heirs and successors could pursue imaginative policies on transport, housing, planning and leisure. He became the dominant influence in the LCC in 1925, led it through six ...”

“... making of a primate. In other words, the conferment of supreme spiritual authority lay beyond the powers of a temporal legislature. This, if truly said, was deadly. In Bolt’s play and in the eye of history it has become More’s nemesis; and what appears to be a contemporaneous longhand note of the conversation, corresponding closely with the ...”

“... Hope’ (1986) ‘Naked’ (1988) ‘Balloon Dog’ (1994-2000) ‘Bear and Policeman’ (1998) ‘Michael Jackson and Bubbles’ (1988)PreviousNext Koons broke through in the early 1980s with a series titled ‘The New’ consisting of store-bought vacuum cleaners and other pristine appliances; set on or placed inside fluorescent light boxes, each immaculate ...”

“... was the final episode of the fifth season of Dynasty, when Amanda Carrington’s wedding to Prince Michael of Moldavia is interrupted by a gang of Balkan rebels bursting into the royal chapel and shooting everyone down with machine-guns. The vaporous metaphorical role played by music in Bel Canto is taken in Patchett’s new novel, State of Wonder, by medical ...”