“... twelve. And he’s only fifteen now but you wouldn’t know.He said, ‘Are you sure?’I said, ‘Michael. It’s a spot, love, that’s all it is,’ and I got him some stuff to put on.He gets his trousers up sharp.He said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’‘Why should I tell Dad? Why should I tell Dad anything?’‘And don’t tell our Maureen.’‘As if,’ I ...”

“... Every picture tells a story – even the illustrations on the covers of books. Michael Kater’s cover shows a rather shabby, cabbage-patch Hitler attending a harvest festival in 1936, receiving the salutes of a crowd in which the faces of adoring women are prominent. The image is both revealing and misleading. The peasant costumes certainly alert us to the affinities between Nazism and provincial kitsch, and Hitler’s studied geniality also reminds us of his extraordinary personal popularity, always much greater than that of the party as a whole or of its other leaders ...”

“... respond to events that took place centuries ago but continue to reverberate? The cultural critic Michael Rothberg proposes the term ‘implicated subject’, something more than ‘bystander’ and more complicated than ‘beneficiary’. No one alive now whose family received wealth from slavery can be considered guilty. But that doesn’t mean, in ...”

“... to mass incarceration, have significantly lower incomes and higher unemployment rates than the white population, and for whom the healthcare system and the overwhelmingly segregated education system and housing market have never provided equitable care, opportunity or provision. As a result of these inequalities, they are being infected and killed at a ...”

“... what to do with all the recurring figures, the CRO-riddle, Bucephalus the (s)talking horse, the white (shaggy?) dog, the valise that survives into the SF future, the polygraph. Any one of them might lead to the heart of the matter. Take the last. It comes up three times, first in ‘Pascal’: Jefferson is so beside himself with glee that he finishes off a ...”

“... Of this sea-shore. Coldly the wind claws me But a burning light snakes along the windows And white mica of cliffs Glitters in that glare. Bank Holiday ... It brings back the long wave Of my own life, Creeping and sliding, sluggish up the slope. It’s getting late. The brassy noise balloons And sags to silence. There come now on their wheelchairs the ...”

“... freed.Free produce was not limited to colonial crops. As well as sugar, cotton and rice (both white and ‘red’), British merchants could acquire a range of new and exotic goods from African sellers. Palm oil and peanut oil were lubricants for industrial machinery and were also used in the production of soap and candles; camwood was a brilliant red ...”

“... very concerned about blood, and would love to have an affair with a local woman as long as she is white. He almost manages this with the wife of a colleague; but he is too vain and rigid to read any of her signals correctly. ‘Her game was subtler and more polished than mine,’ he says finally. This is a fantasy. He didn’t have any game at all. What he ...”

“... question, from long biographies by Graham Robb (2000) and Jean-Jacques Lefrère (2001) to Edmund White’s short but thought-filled account of ‘the double life of a rebel’ (2008). And there is no doubt, so far as I know, that a person called Arthur Rimbaud wrote the works and letters attributed to him. Or that he was born in 1854 in north-eastern France ...”

“... Michael Polanyi lives on in the footnotes. If you want to invoke the idea of ‘tacit knowledge’, Polanyi is your reference of choice. You’ll probably cite his major book Personal Knowledge (1958), maybe the earlier Science, Faith and Society (1946), maybe the later The Tacit Dimension (1966). ‘We know more than we can tell’ was Polanyi’s dictum ...”

“... Mitt Romney has now joined Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale in the political void that awaits any rejected American presidential nominee who doesn’t care to linger into senatorial senescence. Dole appeared in adverts for Viagra. Dukakis has been a public transport activist. Mondale, in 2002, at the age of 74, ran an 11-day campaign for his old Minnesota Senate seat after Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash ...”

“... quest for food. Between 1918 and 1920, the Pavlovs lost their youngest son Vsevolod to the White Army in the civil war (after the Red victory he fled to Constantinople), and their middle son Viktor to typhus, contracted on his way to join the Whites. Pavlov’s brother Sergei died in 1919. His relatives and neighbours succumbed to hunger, disease and ...”

“... Scholar summarises an argument of Stuart Hall’s, reminding us thatCreoles were originally white Europeans, said to have acquired ‘native characteristics’ through long association with the colonial setting, and … the word was then also applied to black African slaves born in the island or territory. Only more recently … did the term Creole come ...”

“... like a monster in an ancient story. All this blue and different blue and greens and acres of blown white, and the mysterious golds and silvers of the after-rain. Between the moon and the neutrinos, and bedevilled by both, is Ireland and the matter of Ireland and the matter with Ireland. Barry – or Kettle? – keeps up a droll thread of running commentary ...”

“... to be fed up with the Democrats’ inability to get bills through Congress.In What It Took to Win, Michael Kazin traces the history over the past two centuries of what he calls ‘the oldest mass party in the world’. Kazin has been engaged with Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John ...”