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“... At independence from Belgium in June 1960, Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first prime minister, inherited a territory the size of India with only 12 African university graduates and no African lawyers, senior civil servants or army officers above the rank of sergeant. Although it was still making vast sums for Belgian commercial interests, the country was bankrupt, and almost immediately it began to fall apart ...”

“... only of droughts and erratic harvests, but of the demands of the IMF. Our Grandmother’s Drums, Mark Hudson’s first book, is a record of the 14 months he spent in the village, not as a member of the Research Council, though he is lent a room in their compound, but as an independent observer. It is an arresting and fascinating work. ...”

“... their pleasure and their politics. Their homes, however, remained some of the worst in Britain. Mark Hudson’s Coming Back Brockens – subtitled ‘A Year in a Mining Village’ – extends this anti-heroic narrative, though from the standpoint of a travel writer and a man of letters rather than, as in Beatrix Campbell’s case, that of embattled ...”

“... ditto the Seine, but it’s the seamless switch to another country, another river, the Hudson, that will set the first blinks into action, as the same exact events unfold, and no one is put out. The story has them in their grip. All these women, sharing in this concern, and no longer alone, or as alone as the woman who, lacking ...”

“... and chimneypot picked out by the glow slanting across the river,       intensified Hudson-light, and warm lamps in the high windows,       neon over the shopfronts flickering on; world of consummate detail,       the city lay back, shambling, corpulent, nude … (why he loves the big frame: because it is no longer ...”

“... America, of main streets, front yards, soft, riverine light: home to James Dean, Ronald Reagan and Mark Twain, three utterly dissimilar characters but emblematic for Tice of a certain idea of America. The images in Lincoln at first seem something else entirely. In fact, through these photographs of memorials of Abraham Lincoln in statuary and signage across ...”

“... The posthumous English publication of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s mammoth novel Shadows on the Hudson has created such a tumel. Critics have been arguing about the quality of the novel, originally serialised in 1957-58 in the New York Yiddish newspaper the Forward; and about the reasons Singer did not have it translated during his lifetime ...”

“... like to forge connections. It is striking to note, for instance – to take an example from Anne Hudson’s book – that Margery Kempe, about whose orthodoxy there was at least considerable doubt, had as her parish priest William Sawtry, the first man to be burnt to death for Lollardy. If the authorities who interrogated her had known that, they might have ...”

“... of an elaborate deception plan labelled ‘Esau’. These are ingenious but probably overshoot the mark. It is certainly true that there was an Israeli contingency plan called ‘Esau’ in existence before the Sèvres conference with the British and French, designed to make it appear that Britain’s ally, Jordan, not Egypt, was Israel’s main target. After ...”

“... landscape, new songs now coming in a rush; almost three decades later, you can still hear Garth Hudson snap the switch.He clicks on the tape-recorder for the second take of the afternoon. The first time they’d been pressing through the number, the piano, bass, and acoustic guitar piling the rhythm up at the end of a phrase, the feel of a mind changing ...”

“... if I were you I should.” ’ Vera was equally keen for her brother to join up and Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge believe that her reliance on what they describe as a ‘sentimentalised conception’ of war affected her relationship with Roland Leighton, who was sent to the Front in March 1915. Leighton had claimed that his purpose in fighting was ‘the ...”

“... on from harm to harm, A land of others and of silence. When Kees’s father read this poem in Hudson Review, he was convinced it contained some clue to his son’s whereabouts, and was disappointed to be told by its author that the poem was just a poem. Justice was, however, eventually able to resurrect the body of Kees’s work, arranging the publication ...”

“... for Jut Butt. Jerry Lewis called her Sylvia, but James Garner called her Sylvia-honey. Rock Hudson called her Eunice and sometimes Maude; she called him Ernie. Her son called her Sis. The character actor Billy de Wolfe called her Clara Bixby, and this is still what her friends call her. Marty Melcher, her third husband and manager, appears to be the ...”

“... them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were displeased about corpses being committed to their snows by English clergymen – Switzerland was not yet an English colony, though beginning to look like one – and the bodies were reinterred at Zermatt. The ...”

“... thought nothing of covering forty miles in a day, and his vigorous outings to New Jersey, up the Hudson, or out to Long Island are described with excitement and relish. His excursions with Elsie were less strenuous, but he is pleased to note that she is ‘an excellent walker’, for ‘a walk is better, almost, than sleep.’ ‘Take a little walk on ...”