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“... because he asks. It is reasonable to say, however, that until the Fianna Fail Government came to power in the spring of 1987, he didn’t really get what he asked for. Export credit insurance to Iraq was not something that any Western government would countenance. Then, it appears, George Bush persuaded Eximbank to provide $200m worth of cover ‘for ...”

“... reinforcing his disbelief in the accusations: You enquire what the fugitive Lady has in her power. She has, I think, nothing in her power but to return home and mend her behaviour. To obtain a separate maintenance she must prove either cruelty to her person or infidelity to her bed, and I suppose neither charge can be ...”

“... Jayne Anne Phillips’s first novel of more than a decade ago, Machine Dreams, reconstructed the history of three generations of a single middle-class, small-town American family over the course of some fifty years. From the perspective, by turns, of parents and children, she contemplated the complexities and banalities of relations among family members against the political background of the time, focusing on the far-ranging effects that were brought to bear by the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War ...”

“... to Wyclif’s mind, and to Wyclif’s Oxford, has grown exponentially. As for the long view, Anne Hudson’s magisterial The Premature Reformation (1988) set new standards for the study of Wycliffite texts and their users. Wyclif divides into five parts: his origins and early life in north Yorkshire, of which precious little is known; the University of ...”

“... fell the shadow of another woman of gifts and intelligence, who was a queen herself for a spell: Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother. In an age when Thomas More showed his radical mettle by according his daughters the same education as his sons, Anne had been allowed to cultivate her mind to an unusual degree; she had also ...”

“... impression that Mr Newby has raised a theme which he has not completely grasped and realised. For Anne Devlin there is no problem in seeking a theme. Her problem, by her own confession, is to escape from a theme – from Ireland, from the troubles, from Belfast, and indeed from haunting visions known to so many of us, whether we are Irish or not, of the ...”

“... the powers of irritation. You do not have to work overtly as a satirist to take advantage of the power of poetic language to cause discomfiture, to break us out of the reality we usually wish to accept, or are resigned to accepting. Aphra Behn can be described as a late baroque poet. Unlike rococo artists, she really has some belief in the grand style ...”

“... with truly regal generosity to those many unfortunates huddled at the opposite end of the wealth, power and status spectrum. But there was more to this mangered and magical moment than supererogatory royal beneficence. Even in the cosy, impromptu confines of the Christmas stable, the gift relationship was more subtle, complex and ambiguous. For there was also ...”

“... legend itself, now that Romola and the others with the living memory are dead, has increased its power. It continues to permit imaginative leaps of all kinds, choreographic, cinematic and literary – that is, there is no end to further imaginative work about the Nijinsky legend embedded inside the Diaghilev legend, which in turn vibrates inside the ...”

“... about his business in a world of warm statues, suspended rain-drops and unmoving seas. He uses his power for personal gain, not of a financial sort (he is too scrupulous, and essentially uninterested), but for erotic profit. In the variable nights that are days for him alone he indulges in sexual larceny, stealing moments of women’s privacy, scrutinisinig ...”

“... Tulliver’s haircut and Jane Eyre’s sitting with her book between the curtains and the window. Anne Tyler, however, writes with intelligent and unapologetic enthusiasm about the Monicas. The heroine of The Amateur Marriage, her 16th novel, is absolutely ordinary. When we first meet Pauline in 1941 she’s a sweet, pretty girl who works as a receptionist in ...”

“... leads where she takes the air, looking across the rooftops of London to those institutions of male power, the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey. Like the third storey at Thornfield Hall from whose terrace Jane surveys the landscape, vowing to have her share of life, even if she is a female and ‘poor, obscure and plain’ to boot, Galesia’s ...”

“... singular eminence. He was almost kingly in status. His first cousins included two queens (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard). He spent four years of his youth as the companion of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy. Howard blood was blue enough to pose a threat to the succession, as Surrey’s uncle Thomas discovered when he was imprisoned in ...”

“... which is the true secret of her success and was obviously much stronger than her sense of power or money, or even of style and society. Her intelligence was all about sex; and she was sexually attractive all her life, with no recourse to being the sort of distanced, trumpeting social presence or demanding sacred monster that so many celebrated old ...”

“... modern sauce. Charles may have been sexually, if unconsciously, attracted to his sister, Henriette-Anne, who was married to the sexually ambivalent brother of the French king. It is all beautifully told, with lively asides. We are informed that Charles’s alleged debauchery, as opposed to ‘sheer love of women’ and ‘great physical energy’, was not very ...”