“... who were wrestling with apartheid, among them Nadine Gordimer, Ezekiel Mphelele, Dennis Brutus and Lewis Nkosi.From the start, Transition had commissioned work from political figures. In the second issue, in 1961, Julius Nyerere published a defence of the one-party system that would soon exasperate so many of the magazine’s writers: the following year he ...”

“... of revolt did, however, run in the family. His maternal grandmother, Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle ...”

“... it spilled into the uncanny, defying conventional means to describe it. Surrealism abounded, as Paul Fussell captured in The Great War and Modern Memory – Holland notices similar flashes of absurdity in the 1940s. A combat-shocked soldier exclaimed to his German captors: ‘For heaven’s sake, you all have English faces!’ Alan Moorehead’s ‘madcap ...”

“... a retreat from the world and her protectiveness toward Robert intensified when his little brother Lewis died in infancy. A third son, Frank, was born in 1912, too young to be a playmate for the lonely Robert, though they became companions as adults.* Isolated from other children at an early age, Robert developed keen intellectual abilities while his social ...”

“... Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia ...”

“... thrill, the prospect of terror – that attracted Ezra Pound to Fascism. Yeats, Heidegger, Wyndham Lewis, Céline, Paul de Man, Gottfried Benn, Marinetti – the list of intellectuals who supported Fascism is all too familiar. Generations of scholars have tried to explain the multiplicity of motives that led them towards the ...”

“... private school accent (he and my grandfather were born and brought up in London, and went to St Paul’s) Robin describes the events of a May night and morning near the plantation where he was assistant manager in Kodanad, high in the mountains in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. The previous night a leopard had killed a bullock belonging to one of the ...”

“... state’ is the most impressive analysis of the way 18th-century Britain actually worked since Lewis Namier anatomised its parliamentary and electoral system in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III sixty years ago. Brewer’s main target is the notion that because domestic government was sometimes more amateur and decentralised in much ...”

“... about American affairs for NOW which East Coast radicals, like Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman, were always assuring me should be disregarded as entirely mythomaniacal; they were nevertheless extremely entertaining. Reading his poems at the same time as his personal letters and his scurrilous public letters, I soon developed the image of a ...”

“... of oppressive respectability. Some instances of slumming can, of course, be furnished: C. Day Lewis was free to write detective fiction under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake and so not soil the reputation of the serious poet. Pseudonymy is essentially a disguise, a device for throwing readers off the scent. For absolute security’s sake the choice of ...”

“... the people involved had been hoboing to Memphis, just like Brother Robert often did. He followed Paul Robeson’s activism and enjoyed Robeson’s movie Show Boat. He was no dummy, he read the paper. You can hear his awareness of racism in his music. He doesn’t want sundown to catch him where he isn’t supposed to be. He’s telling you something. He ...”

“... refers in particular to the way Ramsey’s work anticipates that of Kuhn, Dummett, Nozick and D.K. Lewis. The paper he singles out as ‘the one from which we still have most to learn’ is ‘General Propositions and Causality’, one of the ‘Last Papers’, It deals with the distinction between a scientific law and a merely accidentally true ...”

“... open to infections that were thought, in industrialised countries, to be things of the past. As Lewis Thomas points out in his contribution to In Time of Plague, it gives us a glimpse of how most people in the world have always died: painfully, usually at an early age. And Aids, in another sense, returns us to the condition of our more recent forebears: it ...”

“... The Jazz Singer as it ran on Broadway, toured the country, and was televised in 1959 with Jerry Lewis in the tide role: the repentant son replaces his dying father as cantor, who had in turn replaced his father, who had in turn ... It was a ritual, sentimentalised affirmation of eternal Jewishness even in the thick of the New World. The ...”

“... be triggered, or even inherited. I cannot even look at a bevel, my mother has told me hauntedly. Lewis Carroll saw a pack of playing cards, but he might have seen the Supreme Face. What happens when the phenomenon has a name, an explanation? If the state can be entered through the physical: through repetition, the fondling of beads, looking at a bevel, what ...”