“... the edges of the group – worshipping André Breton, befriending René Crevel, looking up to Max Ernst – he preferred their talk of revolution to any art they made, and never said a word at their gatherings. His photographs from that time feel as timid as he professed to be in their company. He was under no illusions about some of the early phases of ...”

“... poet Louis Bouilhet: This morning we arrived in Egypt … we had scarcely set foot on shore when Max, the old lecher, got excited over a negress who was drawing water at a fountain. He is just as excited by little negro boys. By whom is he not excited? Or, rather, by what? … Tomorrow we are to have a party on the river, with several whores dancing to the ...”

“... Thackeray), Augustus Noel Follin (a businessman from Cincinnati), Edward Payson Willis (a literary black sheep) and, most scandalously of all, King Ludwig of Bavaria, whose long entanglement with Lola brought disgrace, in the opinion of many, on the city of Munich. ‘What a hold this miserable witch has obtained over this old, adulterous idiot ...”

“... the studio, infecting everything which could be touched. The germs, Charlotte thought, must be the black specks which she saw everywhere, on her books and clothes. Before the Clean Air Acts, everything in London, as soon as the winter fogs began, was black, or blackish, by the end of the day. Charlotte, always immaculate in ...”

“... idols he disapproved of into exploratory categories, claiming in his review of a biography of Max Beerbohm that he was Jewish and homosexual when he happened to be neither. Muggeridge’s brand of impeachment would make anyone not only glad but anxious to be included under it; and both Furbank’s admirable critical study of 1948, and Philip Henderson’s ...”

“... of favour; who, since early in this century, has been consistently described in negative terms? Max Friedländer, in his great corpus of Netherlandish painting (1924-37), put it that Memling was neither an explorer like Van Eyck nor an inventor like Rogier van der Weyden. And Erwin Panofsky cleverly called him ‘the very model of a major minor ...”

“... the first war. Chaudhuri rejoiced when those allegedly spindly legs trounced a crack team of the Black Watch at football. Not least among the illuminations in these remarkable books is Chaudhuri’s unflinching sense of the disaster brought about by Independence. As a historian, he is conscious of its inevitability, but deplores the way it was done and the ...”

“... repeats. In one of these, Xenophanes observes that Ethiopians say their gods are snubnosed and black, while Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair (‘gray eyes’ in Auden). Another is by Kafka: ‘The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make men stumble than ...”

“... on Sea’), and in latitude from Cape Town (‘Henry’s cousin has a farm here – wonderful black people bringing cold drinks!’) to ‘ “The Dreaded North of the Park”, Yorkshire Moors, Dumfriesshire, Inverness (in that order)’. But dedicated fieldwork by itself is not enough. Ungenerous as it may seem to carp at the fruits of so much ...”

“... for Truffaut because he charms us? His first ‘big’ film (it in fact had a small budget, was in black-and-white, and ran for 94 minutes) was Les Quatre Cent Coups, about his thwarted childhood. The stubborn, hurt, exploring eyes of Jean-Pierre Léaud as ‘Antoine Doinel’, Truffaut’s alter ego, enlist us from the start in his rebellion. But then ...”

“... I remember​ being mesmerised by a shackle displayed in Philadelphia’s Lest We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of Slavery. It was a terrible object, the bequest of a past that is still too close. There was nothing metaphorical in the cold, heavy iron. To be ‘shackled’ by that instrument of brutality was not to be constrained or inhibited ...”

“... case, and she was wholly opposed to the weakening of educational standards for any cause, whether Black or Feminist. It is with considerable regret that I have to confess that I do not read her books with much profit. As Bhikhu Parekh explains – and he does so at much greater length than Miss Young-Bruehl, whose primary concern is the life rather than the ...”

“... captain, he thrust his hands firmly into the pockets of his reefer-coat and pointed his ‘black torpedo beard’ in a vaguely navigational manner at the distant horizon. Ford he mistook for the gardener. Like James, Conrad was capable of rages which were ‘sudden, violent, blasting and incomprehensible’. The hurt Ford felt is understandable. It was ...”

“... covered Europe with graves, ashes and tears.’ Appropriately, The Battle won the Prix Goncourt. Max Gallo’s million-selling quartet of novels, by contrast, gleefully embraces the myth of the ‘grand homme’ in its most lurid, overblown form. If Rambaud displaces the focus from Napoleon to the ordinary men and women drowning in his wake, Gallo places the ...”

“... across all sorts of subjects: verse techniques, the difficulty of finding servants, staying with Max Beerbohm, the Test series, his first meeting with Thomas Hardy, the shortcomings of his wife/son/daughter-in-law, his neglect by the critics – this last a recurring theme. ‘They don’t understand what a talent I have for light verse.’ He had no pudeur ...”