“... the Marxist Feminist, Esther the Rhodesian dissident and Liberty the firm-breasted, AK 47-toting black guerrilla. The narrative has lots of sexy bits of the ‘he impaled the warm meat of her loins on his questing finger’ kind. News from Nowhere begins with the 1968 May ‘revolution’ in Paris: a great and blissful moment. It ends with a ...”

“... Pompidou gives over a vast and starkly lit vitrine to one of these screens: a wall of 28 hinged black panels that throw elaborate reflections on the gallery floor. She produced a pure black lacquered square to be mounted on a wall like a flat-screen TV in 1915 – the same year as Malevich’s more celebrated ...”

“... respect for human rights.‘I am guided by several principles when it comes to the West Bank,’ Benjamin Netanyahu said at an event this summer to celebrate forty years of the Samaria Regional Council, which governs the settlements. ‘The first: this is our homeland. The second: we will continue to build and develop it. Third: not one resident or community ...”

“... suggests that these forms of resistance ‘may have backfired’ by leading whites to consider black men and women ‘lazy and clumsy workers … a stereotype that continues to this day’. Washington certainly believed that blacks were indolent by nature. But this was an integral part of the ideological justification for slavery, echoed throughout the ...”

“... important because Peggy’s branch of the family was on shaky social footing. In 1911 her father, Benjamin, disappeared to Paris and lost a ‘staggering amount of money’ through bad investments and extravagance. The following April, he and his secretary went down with the Titanic; his young French mistress survived.Peggy, Rebecca Godfrey’s final ...”

“... lives that will never be fully known. ‘I prefer the books just as I found them, covered in black,’ Juan says, before introducing the possibility that he might have blacked the passages out himself. ‘Filled with little poems of illumination. A counternarrative to whatever might have been Dr Henry’s agenda.’ The blackouts of the title refer to ...”

“... in Trotskyism, and he now declares himself an ecological Leninist. His co-authors in White Skin, Black Fuel named themselves the Zetkin Collective after the German communist and feminist Clara Zetkin, whose interpretation of fascism they draw on and whose ashes were interred in 1933 beside the Kremlin Wall.Some will accuse Malm of cosplaying revolution ...”

“... such embarrassing things as the very high murder rate in the US, its hugely disproportionate black prison population, persistent illiteracy and significant levels of political corruption. Even so, there is no doubt in my mind that my experience as a graduate student unconsciously prepared me for later comparative work. My duties as a teaching assistant ...”

“... that charmed him, its combination of photographic realism and fantastic effect, or what Walter Benjamin called the ‘blue flower’ of sensuous immediacy produced through intensive mediation. As a child, Magritte contrived plays and pranks with a gang that included his two younger brothers and assorted neighbourhood pals, and he made home movies for much ...”

“... might bring the whole regime tumbling down.There were a couple of flaws in this argument. The one Benjamin Tromly focuses on is the fact that the Russians eager to stay in the West were not democracy-lovers who had ‘chosen freedom’ but rather, for the most part, involuntary wartime border-crossers, many of whom had then made the best of their situation by ...”

“... riding the bus to school as ‘part of a national experiment in desegregation, with working-class black children from the flatlands being bused in one direction and wealthier white children from the Berkeley hills bused in the other’; the move to Montreal in middle school when her mother was hired at McGill; her decision to return to the US to attend Howard ...”

“... the politics as a deflationary corrective to literary licence. It is rightly a study of the writer Benjamin Disraeli rather than the statesman, the Earl of Beaconsfield. He had a distinctively literary sensibility: this was the medium in which his imagination reached out. His oratory was really spoken prose; it had the smell of ink and midnight oil. His ...”

“... Benjamin​ Netanyahu’s trial for corruption was supposed to begin on 17 March. He had been charged on three separate counts: the first indictment, for fraud and breach of trust, has to do with the alleged receipt of ‘gifts’ – cigars, champagne – with a total value of $200,000 from the Hollywood mogul Arnon Milchan and the Australian billionaire James Packer ...”

“... Yes, yes, Mr Burne-Jones,’ Benjamin Jowett is reputed to have said as he inspected the artist’s newly completed Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union, ‘but what does one do with the Grail once one has found it?’ This sounds almost as much the definitive question as the Grail was the definitive quest, but Jowett’s objection is more radically misconceived than any answer could be ...”

“... become acquainted with shades and degrees of dark of which I was previously unaware, from pitch black to the bright light of the full moon, and acquainted, too, with the noises of the night, the barking of foxes, the hooting of owls, the cracking of the fire, the stirring of the sleeping dogs, the sound of rainfall (particularly loud on the roof of a ...”