“... the niceties of racial domination: Henry Bedford lynched for ‘talking disrespectfully to a young white man’; Jesse Thornton for ‘addressing a white police officer without the title “mister”’; Malcom Wright for ‘yielding too little of the roadway to a white man as he passed in his wagon’. Anthony Crawford rejected a ‘white merchant’s ...”

“... on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the tragic’ in his own work, the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen once said that ‘the plantation experience had severe and traumatic psychic impacts … but overwhelmingly had to do with what is the very ground of our being, which is our body.’ This is an obvious reason slavery goes with revenge tragedy. The ...”

“... as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride of Abydos ...”

“... of alternatives when presented only with the choice that has been made? As composer-pianist David Tudor once said of the piece: ‘With Boulez the form is completely external. In the big section, there’s a breathtaking sound that is just like glass. With one of us younger cats the sound itself would have dictated the form of the work, whereas that ...”

“... universal services such as university tuition, prescriptions, period products and bus travel for young and old. But there has been little direct confrontation with the middle classes who also benefit from these things.Since the Greens joined the SNP in government in 2021, however, things do seem to have shifted further left. Humza Yousaf, who replaced Nicola ...”

“... Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if sponsors put up £2 million, or 20 per cent of the capital costs, such ‘businesses, individuals, churches or voluntary bodies’ would get ‘considerable freedom over management structures and processes’, and of course a ...”

“... the story, and from other evidence, that it was the disturbance to the natural order that made the young Isaiah tremble and flinch. Other members of his family, including a much-loved uncle and aunt, were quite active supporters of the SR (Socialist Revolutionary) movement. Neither then nor in retrospect did he register any allegiance of that sort. Ignatieff ...”

“... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...”

“... given a white piano for her birthday: she sits on it and is wheeled round the room by a crowd of young men in dinner jackets who are supposedly students at an all-male college. Walters himself dances with Garland as she spins round the room with a Ginger Rogers-ish velocity and style. Her dress is floor-length and fitted down to the hips, with embroidery ...”

“... in my view, but that’s a topic for another day.)The head scientist at Nvidia was a man called David Kirk. As he told Witt,‘with parallel computing, it really took us a fair amount of convincing to talk Jensen into it … Same with CUDA. We really had to make the business case.’ But with AI, Huang experienced a Damascene epiphany. ‘He got it ...”

“... intellectual and emotional energy, when he left Ireland and pursued a career in England. As David Bromwich has already pointed out, there is an English Burke whom O’Brien never makes known to his readers. He understands, and can excitingly depict, the oratory and politics of Burke’s House of Commons; but since he is intent on arguing that the ghosts ...”

“... and the titillating, although Knowlson’s sureness of touch deserts him on the topic of the young Beckett and prostitutes, his prose veering wildly between the disingenuously coy and the frankly sexist. Above all, there is the novelty value of the unpublished diaries Beckett kept during his stay in Germany in 1936-7. We get a sense of Beckett ...”

“... Brideshead has been built up is really adequate to the issues at stake. Conservative writers like David Watkin, Roger Scruton and, to a lesser extent recently, Gavin Stamp have worked with impressive zeal to see that every wretched tower block in the land is listed as a national monument to the reforming ambitions of 1945. They have also presented themselves ...”

“... College Hospital was dead and all medical records destroyed: but I very foolishly forgot that the young houseman does the day-to-day work, and he wrote to me from his retirement with important new evidence. Apparently Orwell didn’t stand a chance: but they did not tell him, or Sonia. The nature of George Orwell’s own writings raises three particular ...”

“... year of two Russian colleagues at different ends of the journalistic ladder – Dmitry Kholodov, a young reporter on Moskovsky Komsomolets, killed by a briefcase bomb while investigating corruption in the military; and Vladislav Listyev, killed after he announced that notoriously corrupt advertising practices would be suspended at the main state TV channel ...”