“... shed, but he opposed the efforts of Oxford’s rising liberals to tidy up Christianity. He found Benjamin Jowett’s Hegelised Plato a poor substitute for St Paul and skipped Matthew Arnold’s poetry lectures because they clashed with cricket matches. All the same, he thrived. He won a fellowship at Merton. He translated French roundelays and befriended ...”

“... since 1917. Perhaps he means the most original Marxist thinker, but even that is dubious. Walter Benjamin is surely a better qualified candidate for that title. Even the most erudite students of Marxism, however, will find themselves learning from these essays. It is, for example, part of the stock-in-trade of historical materialism that Marx broke ...”

“... chin, pending below an ever open mouth ... he wore on a monumental nose a pair of pince-nez with a black ribbon to them.’ The full description occupies a long paragraph and is a touch overwritten but remains remarkable, and Marching Spain is an observant and enjoyable book. The years of self-imposed exile notwithstanding, Pritchett was from the start an ...”

“... start of the Iraq War; they impelled him to fill in the blank spots on the maps, to register the black sites somehow. Thus Limit Telephotography (2005-present), his series of photographs of remote surveillance systems and clandestine military operations taken with high-powered lenses usually at a great distance (as far as sixty miles away) and often on land ...”

“... was the crisis in Anglicanism, and Symonds was in any event one of the unlikelier products of Benjamin Jowett’s Balliol. But the Apostolic practice of unsparing self-analysis and the Apostolic ideal of absolute honesty and openness with one’s intellectual intimates certainly fed into the late Victorian revolt against repression and hypocrisy. It is ...”

“... spent their brief, uneasy childhoods in clay nests alongside siblings, small, mad planets, black as forest berries. This looping through sensation, through layerings of metaphor and whimsy, this tracing of delicate aerial patternings, this speeding instability is what you get in Zagajewski. Contraries – hard and soft, timidity and boldness, silence ...”

“... the exodus to Marseille and he became close with the Surrealists: André Breton, Max Ernst and Benjamin Péret were among those also waiting for an exit visa. At first through the collective drawing game of ‘exquisite corpse’ and then in a stream of ink drawings, Lam unleashed a burst of fantastical forms: combinations of human and animal anatomy flow ...”

“... is I had the best fucking fifteen years of my life.’ Peters quotes the former New Zealand All Black Carl Hayman, talking about his early-onset dementia: ‘I was a commodity, and I understood that … It’s like that scene in [Band of Brothers] when the guy tells the bloke with shell shock: “When you accept you’re dead, you can function as a ...”

“... language’ have been defined, for at least three centuries, as universal. In France there is no black novel, no Jewish novel and certainly no gay novel, although a black Caribbean writer such as Patrick Chamoiseau can win the Goncourt and many French writers have been Jewish or homosexual or both. In Britain the situation ...”

“... music improved vigilance, mental alertness and working efficiency; in 1972 Black & Decker reported a 1.42 per cent gain in productivity once music by Muzak was installed, while, at St Joseph’s Hospital in Yonkers, NY, Dr Frank B. Flood, chief of cardiology, saw improved recovery rates in the intensive care unit.From the start, the two ...”

“... Author​ of the anti-racist jeremiad Black Skin, White Masks; spokesman for the Algerian Revolution and author of The Wretched of the Earth, the ‘bible’ of decolonisation; inspiration to Third World revolutionaries from the refugee camps of Palestine to the back streets of Tehran and Beirut, Harlem and Oakland; founder, avant la lettre, of post-colonialism; hero to the alienated banlieusards of France, who feel as if the Battle of Algiers never ended, but simply moved to the cités: Frantz Fanon has been remembered in a lot of ways, but almost all of them have foregrounded his advocacy of resistance, especially violent resistance ...”

“... took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio, and Lewis, impassive beneath his trademark wide black hat, seemed content to watch in silence. ‘Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible,’ Hemingway wrote. So wide was the margin between master ...”

“... Like Willis and Sydenham, leading doctors such as Etienne-Jean Georget, Pierre Briquet or Benjamin Brodie saw hysteria as a nervous and, as such, non-gendered disorder. It is to this tradition that Charcot belongs: for him, hysteria was a neurosis caused by a ‘functional’ injury to the nervous system. This is why, in a spirit simultaneously ...”

“... letters to their families often mentioned incidents of violence, and an 11-volume diary kept by Benjamin Brown French, who arrived in Washington from New Hampshire in 1833 and worked as a clerk in the House of Representatives for more than thirty years. In one way or another, Freeman shows, many constituents were aware of the strife. Some sent their elected ...”

“... hay-stacks, silage-pits, building-sites, a thatched cottage even – seems to be draped in black polythene and weighted against the wind, like a Christo sculpture. This is prime Muldoon territory – things insulated and concealed inside themselves, the purely random and over-artistic somehow marrying, seeming revelations that lead nowhere-but the ...”