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“... inchoate hopes and dreams: ‘For some reason I have never lost faith,’ writes the narrator of Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!, ‘not since I was a young child, in the power of letters to transform my existence . . . there is the white envelope, that glorious rectangle of pure possibility which has even shown ...”

“... his main aim. What he had wanted was for the Arabs to take the opportunity of the war to seize power for themselves, in a great pan-Arab federation if possible. He persuaded himself that he had at least Britain’s agreement to this. When the time came to ‘settle’ the Middle East after the war, however, all that ‘turned to ashes in a single ...”

“... usually travels one way: from drolling judge to desperate malefactor, mirroring the imbalance of power in practice. Even the rare exceptions give the punchline to power. In the 1721 edition of Cambridge Jests, a condemned thief tries to charm his way to a commuted sentence: ‘my Lord, your Name is Bacon, and mine is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the British political culture to be. Ponting resembles Cobbett confronted with ‘the Thing’: power is corrupting and corrupt; bad decisions are taken by wicked men; wicked men get into power partly because wicked men like power and become politicians, partly because the system of ...”

“... of an eye ailment, string vest peeking out through the gap created by a forgotten button. Out of power, unwilling or unable to leave his house, Aristide seemed to me small, meek and sad. To his supporters, aspersions about Aristide’s mental health and allegations about violent behaviour were part of a decades-long attempt to subvert the democratic ...”

“... the course of the five-week campaign the election simply ran away from Chirac and the PS swept to power. It won 246 seats and the rest of the Left a further 74. To most commentators, it seems, all this came as a great surprise, yet there was nothing very remarkable in the voters’ sharp reaction to record unemployment, broken promises and Presidential ...”

“... ammunition: John Ford, John Wayne, Henry Hathaway and the Colt, legendary instrument of masculine power and decisiveness. The general’s impromptu movie was a good deal more exciting than the twenty-minute one that we were actually filming. At dinner that evening, everyone, including the director’s female PA, couldn’t stop talking about their new-found ...”

“... show his sympathies to have been wholly with the colonists, curtly informed by the colonial power that no more is demanded of them than ‘implicit obedience – unconditional submission – and your money’. Nor was the satire he directed at the English class system and religion, especially the established Church, or at contemporary attitudes to ...”

“... push the beginnings back to the surveillance and discipline – ‘the new technologies of power’ – that the monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries developed to control their subjects. Valentin Groebner traces the origins back to the regulatory urges of even older political and religious institutions: ‘Modern identity papers can in fact be ...”

“... fighting only in self-defence. According to a patriotic broadside of 1803, the French fight for Power, for Plunder, and extended Rule – WE, for our Country, our Altars, and our Homes. – They follow an ADVENTURER, whom they fear – and obey a Power which they hate – WE serve a Monarch whom we love, a GOD whom we ...”

“... a nervous breakdown, nor why he receives messages from well-wishers like ‘the David and Jonathan Society, a newly-formed group of young, caring, Jewish faggots’. Joshua’s mother runs a massage parlour called Oral is Beautiful in Winnipeg which offers bilingual services. This is hardly enlightening. As baffling is the police interest in certain ...”

“... is now, the worst thing one intellectual could call another. For reasons explained in Jonathan Israel’s fascinating The Radical Enlightenment,* there was, in 1680, a simple litmus test for intellectual and moral responsibility. You failed this test if you believed, as Spinoza did, that motion is intrinsic to matter, for that would imply that God ...”

“... after legend’ arrived at the table. He counts them in: Alan Sugar, Carol Vorderman, Jonathan Ross, Miriam Stoppard, Tony Parsons. Even for someone who started his career in national journalism as a showbiz reporter on the Sun, these are pitifully undemanding exemplars of legends. At one party he is quite near to someone who might just ...”

“... parallels complemented literary and mythological allegories. In The Crisis of 1614, essays by Jonathan Gibson and Stephen Clucas show Ralegh’s cousin Sir Arthur Gorges adapting Lucan’s verse history of Rome’s civil wars, and Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Cotton rewriting the reign of Henry III, with an eye to Jacobean political anxieties. Cotton was ...”