“... 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 ...”

“... Edward II signed an ordinance to pave it, though the work needed to be redone in 1353, just as the Black Death swept through London. By 1400, the great medieval flourishing of the Strand had begun. At the time, it was the first road above the northern bank of the Thames; its newly built palaces, most of them the London seats of diocesan bishops, had gardens ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pictures from Hollywood, which had for its subject the life of the great British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. The scene that comes back is during a debate in the House of Commons on some great issue, when Disraeli sat with eyes closed, seemingly asleep, while the Leader of the Opposition, probably Mr Gladstone, went through his speech. Disraeli ...”

“... placed at her disposal by the Californian biotech company whose services she had used, to choose a black donor? Presumably the desire to assert her independent spirit, her nonconformity and her anti-racism all at the same time. She had used her child as a kind of advertising billboard, a way of displaying the image that she wanted to give of herself ...”

“... Mike Davis. In his epigraph Davis situates himself and his ambitions with a quotation from Walter Benjamin: ‘The superficial inducement, the exotic, the picturesque has an effect only on the foreigner. To portray a city, a native must have other, deeper motives – motives of one who travels into the past instead of into the distance. A native’s book ...”

“... produced by the English Reformation, and stirred up by the doctrines peddled by the ‘black Regiment’ of Massachusetts clergy. The loyalist historian Joseph Galloway agreed and laid the revolt at the door of ‘republican sectaries’ whose opinions ‘were equally averse to those of the established Church and Government’. Most intransigent of ...”

“... off a white woman (herself regarded, originally, as a threat) we are on her side and against the black people on Kong’s island; but when the islanders join forces with the Anglos we side with them against the ape, and when Kong is challenged by a dinosaur we root for the ape against the lizard – who finally takes the form of the aliens (reptilian ...”

“... so many of its commodified exhibits came. It is the universe massively investigated by Walter Benjamin as the origin of what was later to be termed ‘la société du spectacle’. But ‘exposition’ also refers to a set of literary interests and methods, reflecting a new preoccupation with spatialised representation, a move away from the metaphor of ...”

“... to revive the noblest political lineage of Europe, that of ‘Dr Johnson, Pitt the Younger, Burke, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury’. Some other recent world-histories have taken a stand against Euro-centrism, notably William McNeill’s A World History (1971) and J.M. Roberts’s The Hutchinson History of the World (1976). In this regard, Mr Thomas is a ...”

“... would neither pick his pocket nor break his leg? Soon after his death, a fellow Virginian, ‘Black Horse Harry’ Lee, weighed in with his malicious Observations on the Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1832), which told a story of base deception focused on Jefferson’s betrayal of George Washington. In 1837, Francis Lister Hawks revived the charges of ...”

“... elaborate distancing from the feel of the photographic – the blurring and smearing, the way black and white seem to drift towards a weaker, less inflected, more listless overall grey – end up achieving? What does the artist do to the ‘photographic’ and the ‘painted’, as he receives the categories from the culture at ...”

“... the Daily Mail, a full-length Singer Sargent portrait, The Diary of a Nobody. In 1896, A. & C. Black purchased the rights to a dull annual almanac called Who’s Who and relaunched it the following year in a format designed to appeal to contemporary taste. The original Who’s Who of 1849 consisted of lists: members of the royal household, the House of ...”