“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... elements in this painting were conditioned by its setting. The church interior is illustrated in black and white to show how the arched vault in the altarpiece echoes that of the chapel in which it is placed and how the pilasters of the painting’s stone frame echo those which mark the entrance to the chapel itself. The lighting on the saints in the ...”

“... do the kind of natural history that is now dignified as science. Witherby himself, the patrician Max Nicholson recalls in his Introduction to this final volume of the BWP, had a ‘track record of serious ornithological exploration’. Stanley Cramp, by contrast, who retired early from Customs and Excise in the Sixties and an active life in the London ...”

“... the incision, the red wound and hand, so harsh and sudden against the swooning white thigh and the black coats.’ Composition, colour and pictorial focus converge effortlessly in this passage, which makes a single portion of the vast canvas come vividly alive. Sometimes, however, the surface is a little too smooth, the rhetoric too slick, the verbiage too ...”

“... His translator George Szirtes has written of ‘the slow lava flow of narrative … the vast black river of type’, which beautifully describes the physical experience of reading Krasznahorkai’s work, the need to slow down in order to find its rhythm, the feeling that the narrative is oozing outward rather than converging on a neat conclusion. ‘It ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Crawford, in full colour, has bouffant hair, a big smile and expensive teeth. Johnson, in grainy black and white, wears a black leather jacket, with a pipe jutting rigidly from between his lips and a stare that seems to ask the eternal pub question: ‘What are you looking at?’ In a comment under the article, a ...”