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“... which people slip in and out of their different roles, adapting and discarding their mantles of power (Chaudhuri imposes great burdens of meaning on his adverbs, and sometimes over-uses them), and announces the arrival of an insidious irony which creeps up on us as the passage unfolds, with ‘lecture’, ‘logic’ and ‘transcended’ each getting more ...”

“... Caesarist dictatorships of various kinds. During the Second World War, while Hitler projected his power through mass rallies, George VI stammered for England.The second form of royal representativeness therefore has been the human and familial. The royal family provided a titillating soap opera centuries before the term was invented. Through the ...”

“... Knights stresses that ideas of fiduciary public trust were first advanced by critics of royal power during the Civil War. These men talked of a public good: the ideal office-holder should be impartial, selfless and accountable; any corruption or venality was a ‘breach of trust’. They drew up a ‘black list’ of MPs who had accepted offices and ...”

“... wants.’ But that terrible memory of the Poitiers operating theatre, which spoke so eloquently of power and sovereignty and their pitiless impress upon the body – the patient’s body, his own body – stays with young Foucault for the rest of his life. He is tortured with dreams of a floating surgeon’s scalpel. During his student years at ENS he slashes ...”

“... in an introductory note by a Conjunctions associate editor, an unknown 22-year-old American called Jonathan Safran Foer. ‘These pages of Singer’s are not great literature,’ Foer wrote. ‘Surely they were never intended to be published’: But like all great literature, like the stories, plays and poems by which these 18 days are now surrounded, they ...”

“... Russia and the US are still the world’s most heavily armed nuclear states, but Russia’s power is hugely diminished. It has no ambitions for restoring anything like the Soviet Union, let alone becoming a global superpower again. It seeks international influence and respect, not empire. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research ...”

“... he never wore the crown. In domestic politics Curzon was certainly no dictator; his punching power was below average. This is best shown by his career as Foreign Secretary under Lloyd George and Baldwin. Too often he lost the arguments, though in hindsight his views made a lot of sense. He disliked the Balfour Declaration, which he thought ignored the ...”

“... was founded on Britain’s formal and informal imperial presence and on her massive naval power. So Irish Home Rule, and Gladstone’s attempts to limit naval spending in 1893, were opposed vigorously, and the City was in the vanguard of the campaign for increased estimates in 1909. But its pride in nation went beyond reasoned calculation. Escalating ...”

“... Otto von Bismarck, in spite of constant illness and breakdowns, continued to exercise his power over the old emperor. The crown prince felt utterly useless: ‘fifty years, life therefore behind me, idle observer in daily self-denial, discipline practised over a lifetime, condemned passively to while away the final years.’ On 9 March 1888, two weeks ...”

“... coloured revolutions are pure and simple banditry.’ How has Lukashenko managed to remain in power? Belarus’s two giant neighbours, Russia and the European Union, have both had a difficult relationship with him. The Kremlin has switched between wooing and subsidising him and denouncing and putting an economic squeeze on him. The EU tried diplomatic ...”

“... values: ‘articulation can bring us closer to the good as a moral source, can give it power.’ The metaphor of a moral source recurs through the book and, although it is crucial to the argument, it is never quite clearly explained. To say that describing values people have not known about opens up the possibility that they will be endorsed is one ...”

“... society. The obscure American naval captain Alfred Thayer Mahan was one. His Strategy of Sea Power, published in 1890, had earned him honorary degrees in Oxford and Cambridge by 1893: Mahan told an anxious British public what it most wanted to hear about its navy. Denis Mack Smith is another. His Cavour and Garibaldi, published in 1954, told many ...”

“... prompted him to join the National Socialists in January 1931, two years before they seized power. During that period Speer became, faute de mieux, the impecunious party’s interior designer of choice. His initial willingness to work without a fee eased his way. He was also lucky enough to be the only party member in Wannsee who owned a car, a prized ...”

“... the Taliban hadn’t had the funds to build any new schools in the two years they had held power in Kandahar. Women would be allowed to work outside the home once the war was over. Stoning was the punishment for adultery, with the man put into a sack and the woman, in her burqa, placed in a pit up to her waist before the crowd pitched in. It was an ...”

“... Gothic horror tale, detective mystery, autobiography, political history: Jonathan Coe’s appealingly ambitious new novel involves a promiscuous intermingling of literary genres, as a potted social history of Thatcherism is tucked inside some meta-textual high jinks. An anatomy of the appalling Winshaw family, Thatcherite predators of one ilk or another, provides the lens for a scabrous critique of Tory Britain; but at the source of the family’s history lies a mysterious murder, so that the text simultaneously yields us a camped-up whodunnit ...”