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“... with her dramatic looks, wiry black hair, white skin, dark eyes. The character in the novel, Anne, partly based on herself, describing her grief after the death of her first husband, says: ‘But I remained under in my underworld. Nothing in this life had remotely the power that darkness had.’ The book was written ...”

“... a poet to be serious and to sparkle at the same time, but Stallings is one of the few. (I think of Anne Carson’s translation of Aphrodite’s epithet ποικιλόθρον as ‘of the spangled mind’.) It’s not only that she renders works like Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in rhyming fourteeners with gamesome finesse, and makes grumpy Hesiod’s Works ...”

“... and paedophile (much like Fiona Benson’s Zeus in Vertigo & Ghost), a sexual predator whose power is thinly veiled: ‘don’t you want God/To want you?’ At the end of the poem, Brown abandons the language of myth to speak directly about slavery: ‘No one has to convince us./The people of my country believe/We can’t be hurt if we can be ...”

“... Meyers, having secured the story for himself thanks to the co-operation of Morrison’s daughter Anne, has allowed it to skew his biography. Many of his pages read like newspaper précis of the plots of soap operas. Anne Morrison, he writes, still bitter about some aspects of her childhood, feels Kay hurt other people ...”

“... rewriting the history of the Bolshevik underground in Baku, and brooding on the ‘technology of power’: ‘A state apparatus that is a reliable executor of the supreme will must be kept in a state of fear. That fear will then be passed on to the people.’ Oderint dum metuant, in other words. The novel ends with the assassination in December 1934 of the ...”

“... social fabric that holds Britain’s cities together is fraying. New technologies of transport and power become slings for catapulting homes and industry clear of the tangled inner city. Reinforced by an improvident structure of taxation, these forces conspire to undermine civic leadership and create the moral vacuum familiar at the core of today’s ...”

“... of his private experience. Little can be gleaned about his marriages to the wealthy Londoner Anne Carleill, who died childless just two years after they married in 1564, and then in 1566 to the widow Ursula Worseley, with whom he had two children. His sole surviving daughter, Frances, married the poet and Protestant courtier Sir Philip Sidney. Cooper ...”

“... for all the privileged sons born into misery at the centre of intrigues of familiar wealth and power. There is a double edge to our attention to the unhappy rich. We are reassured to know that money doesn’t guarantee love and fulfilment; on the contrary, there is a sense that the proper trajectory for the unhappy rich is downward and tragic. Jane ...”

“... evidence that he claimed to have at his command; and also that only Cromwell’s sudden fall from power and departure from this world made possible the legacy which Elton spent a lifetime exploiting. None of this is in the least biographical. But now Robert Hutchinson rushes in where Elton chose not to tread. His is the first biography of Cromwell since ...”

“... he had been sent to sow doubts about the preacher’s promised indulgences. But Theobald, by the power of the cross, commanded the demon to preach in his stead and even placed his stole around the woman’s neck. Though unwillingly, Abrianus preached with such power that eight hundred men came forward to take the cross. We ...”

“... as will be obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to compare this book with J.T. Noonan’s Power to Dissolve (1972), a major study of lawyers and marriage cases in the Roman curia which analyses the impact of the canon law system on the individual through a close reading of six cases spread over the period 1653-1923. Most surprising of all, the general ...”

“... old age don’t have. Just a question, but what if Sylvia Plath were alive and well, along with Anne Sexton, and the two of them met over occasional lunches to tut-tut over the sloppy rearing of their grandchildren? Death, in any case, has a cachet which lends weight to even the featheriest of lives. A cynic might suppose that Lyndall Gordon was fortunate ...”

“... English Civil War (not the course of events in the 1640s), the role of party in the time of Queen Anne (not the chronology of her reign), the reasons for the failure of the 1848 Revolutions (not the actual course of the revolutions). History is by its nature a critical, sceptical discipline. Historians commonly see one of their main tasks as puncturing ...”

“... cried when they fell out of favour. ‘Did she weep? You are sure? You saw her tears?’ A nasty, power-hungry piece of work? Well no, not if you really knew him, Erdal says. ‘There was no harm intended. It was simply an entertainment for him.’ Quite. Squat-necked Scot Erdal may have been, but she was not, she makes it clear, one of his girls. She was ...”

“... behave like a child, as Lacey reveals in a story about a letter she sent anonymously to Princess Anne, lying about it afterwards. After the war everything changed. Fed up with arguing cases that enabled rich people to pay less tax, Hart decided to return to the academy, and at the age of 38, with only an undergraduate degree in the subject, took up a post as ...”