“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... war into an anti-aircraft unit, from which he deserted. He supported his family after the war by black-market dealing while he worked for his Abitur, before studying literature and philosophy at German universities and the Sorbonne. After completing a dissertation on the Romantic writer Clemens Brentano in 1955, he worked as a radio editor in Stuttgart. The ...”

“... Irving Howe’s memoirs of the New York Trotskisant milieu and ran across this description of Max Schachtman (who Cliff rightly despised): To some, Schachtman never seemed a true leader, for a true leader was not the sort of man who made people laugh or loved crazy jokes. In a large movement he would have found a place as writer and speaker – he was a ...”

“... is constantly getting under the feet of Darmon the historian. The moralist sees everything in black and white (mainly black). He praises occasional ‘liberal’ attitudes but condemns what he calls – in defiance of his own chronology – ‘iniquitous Medieval severity’. Among his favourite adjectives, or his ...”

“... in 1968 by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell) by a single enticing paragraph from a 1940 review of Max Miller at the Holborn Empire, attached as a footnote to ‘The Art of Donald McGill’. The same four-volume collection contains 20 pieces Orwell contributed to newspapers, anthologies and magazines while on the BBC staff, but includes nothing he wrote as a ...”

“... the clotted rag, the odour of wounds and blood.What doesn’t​ much show up in Specimen Days: Black people (enslaved or free), women, Indigenous people. Whitman’s prewar experiences of volatile Democratic party politics; his postwar work at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (from which he was fired for his ‘indecent’ writings). His difficult, unmoored ...”

“... is appropriate to the extravagance of the myth. Parallels with some of Heinrich Mann’s black comedies, with the use of fable and grotesquerie in The Tin Drum, perhaps with Marquez, come to mind. Syberberg uses Brechtian techniques of alienation (placards, back-projection, narrative monologue) to achieve the same distancing effect. But he does not ...”

“... him there. On YouTube we may forever watch Lee, lean and delicate in an open-necked shirt and black suit, step out alone onto the terrace. He looks north across the city, past the Korean foreign ministry towards Bugaksan mountain. The moment would turn out to be the end of one world and the beginning of another: if it wasn’t quite the start of an epoch ...”

“... who made £200,000 by restoring and faking antiquities for Grand Tourists in Rome, running a black market in smuggled silk stockings and turning out portrait busts for vain celebrities, was a sordid skinflint. Henry Cavendish, who discovered hydrogen, died a miser, a recluse and a millionaire. John Courtoy, a fashionable London hairdresser, never had a ...”