“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... between the terms ‘Israelite’ and ‘Jew’ find an echo in the American opposition between ‘Black’ and ‘African-American’. Suchoff praises Finkielkraut’s ‘paradoxical commitment to ethnicity’, while Friedlander acclaims his shift from ‘minority nationalism’ to ‘the assimilationist ideals long associated with the French ...”

“... new and heterogeneous elements, indispensable for the advancement of the poem’s effect’. Benjamin wrote in the Arcades Project that it was as if ‘some law of his poetic nature’ made Hugo ‘stamp every thought with the form of an apotheosis’. His poems, especially the ones conceived on an epic scale, such as Les Contemplations and La Légende ...”

“... It turned out to be a revolutionary appointment. In the face of all kinds of objections from Benjamin Jowett and the like, Evans set about raising money to develop the Ashmolean collection into a research resource for the whole of European archaeology, from prehistory onwards; and he orchestrated its move in 1894 into large new premises behind the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from their dwarfish stature and sinisterly monotone voices. Spacecraft capable of negotiating black holes crash in the Nevada desert, while their occupants display an excited interest in human dentures and genitals. Their speech and bodies are inconceivably different from ours, except for the fact that they speak and have bodies. There can be no alien ...”

“... the administration building was occupied, professors were physically attacked. Off-campus, the Black Panthers were shot up, the Chicago Seven were tried, the yippies attempted to levitate the Merchandise Mart, and the Democratic Convention exploded.’ (It is curious that Geertz does not mention the Vietnam War.) Crisis in Indonesia had moved him towards ...”

“... water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse . . . When I came up – torn, filthy, and stinking – from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart! It is only once they are ‘smeared with good factory muck – plastered ...”

“... Varo’s death in 1963) they met every day, often at the apartment Varo shared with the poet Benjamin Péret and a horde of cats. They spent their afternoons cooking spoof delicacies, such as tapioca dyed black to look like caviar, and sending letters to people chosen at random from the phone book. Along with the ...”