“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”