“... unashamedly reclaiming dignity for the low-life ways of Black proletarians. It’s hard not to read such passages as a swipe at the pretensions of Harlem’s Black bourgeoisie, and of the attitudes of the NAACP, which Du Bois helped found. McKay was determined to portray a version of Black life that, as his biographer Wayne Cooper wrote, was ‘far removed ...”

“... I am waiting​ for a plane at Newark. Time was when anywhere in an airport was a good place to read, or just to go slack and empty, to be nobody in particular and, by that token, more specifically yourself. Now, there are TVs everywhere, placed so that, as I wander out of earshot of one, I come to the next, the news of the latest atrocity or government scandal following me from point to point with all the power and insistence that amplified trivia possess in our time ...”

“... herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But five and twenty. The French have lost ten thousand, of whom all but sixteen hundred were persons of ‘blood and quality’. There is debate over the degree to which Shakespeare ...”

“... accessories; she did not turn up at all to confer with the visiting US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage; she sent a secretary out to buy a ring matching one she had mislaid. Things came to a head in January, when an international conference was called in Tokyo to put together an aid package for Afghanistan at which more than three billion dollars ...”

“... first of a three-volume study to be entitled Bolshevism and the British Left), which may also be read with profit by those interested in current debates about the funding of the Labour Party. In some respects the British CP, whose claim to historic significance is modest, was similar to other CPs. Its members were overwhelmingly drawn from the pre-existing ...”

“... and whose formative influence he sought early on to minimise. Walsh admits his dependence on Richard Taruskin’s ‘monumental’ Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, whose painstaking researches into Stravinsky’s early life and his relations with the Rimsky-Korsakov circle in St Petersburg give body to Walsh’s Stravinsky: A Creative Spring ...”

“... to bring countries together than any number of EU directives.’ He quotes another political hero, Richard Cobden, the Manchester textile manufacturer and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, who described free trade as ‘God’s diplomacy’, not bothering to notice that in the case of the redundant cotton weavers of Bengal, the casualties of cheap Lancashire cloth, God ...”

“... and representatives from the world’s liberation movements. Julia Hervé, the daughter of Richard Wright, came from Paris to interpret from English into French. I did the same, into English, for the Cleavers. ‘We are an integral part of Africa’s history,’ Cleaver said at the conference. ‘White America teaches us that our history begins on the ...”

“... ideas they’re objecting to as much as the words. That was certainly the case in the furore over Richard Eyre’s film version of Harrison’s poem V. when it was shown on Channel Four with none of its expletives deleted.* Campaigners against the film claimed to be horrified by its vulgar tongue but the vulgarity of the author’s origins and politics were ...”

“... and started a riot. The transparency was taken down and ‘Concord’ hastily repainted to read ‘Amity’.Unruly elements were always present in the West End, just beyond the pools of light. The shelter of the shopping arcade was useful for soliciting, the gawping out-of-town tourist an easy mark for a pickpocket. In Covent Garden, two centuries ...”

“... He is perfectly aware that ‘more familiar Cold War sages’ – such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Richard Hofstadter or J.K. Galbraith, none of whom repudiated ‘the more progressivist optimism of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency’ – provided a ‘theoretical rendition of liberalism’ very different from that of the writers he describes as Cold War ...”

“... But her very existence, in its unapologetic vitality, was enough to provoke. The graphic designer Richard Hollis, a contemporary at Wimbledon, found her ‘over-lush, you could say. I don’t know if you’d call it pushy.’ Of her work he says: ‘It’s direct, energetic, and I think that’s how she was … Her work looks quite confident, which is what ...”

“... of books than most readers, and better even than that of many writers (and they have certainly read more than the average novelist, whose gaps are sometimes shocking). But memory is such a shifty and shifting process, constantly duping us. As far as it is possible to generalise, I think we misremember small pictures as being larger than they are, and large ...”

“... library, now in the British Library: it depicts the Battle of Gisors in 1198 between the armies of Richard I of England and Philip II.The chroniclers’ shaping of the public perception of these kings, and their construction of a particular kind of history of the dynasty, is an underlying, if undeveloped, theme of Firnhaber-Baker’s book. The vivid character ...”

“... widespread influence: on directors such as Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and David Fincher, and on the critics in whose work I was immersing myself, the so-called ‘Paulettes’ who populated the culture sections of American publications (notably David Edelstein and Stephanie Zacharek). But not only them. Kael had ...”