“... gently touched the rosary beads ... their lips whistled the faintest prayers; their garments were black.’ But Jack also recalled a figure of hate standing over the cot he lay in as a baby, and he reflects in the same letter: ‘I drove it out of my mind at once that it was Gerard risen like a ghost from his bed of miseries ... These are the beginnings of my ...”

“... his company’s image as non-racist, pro-African and hostile to the illegal Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith. He lit upon Duncan Sandys, a slow-witted, racist, pro-Rhodesian right-wing Tory MP, described by another director as ‘bent ever since he was a lower boy at Eton’. Sandys was interested in chairing Lonrho for one reason only: the remuneration. He ...”

“... written archives must by now fall open at the right places, marked perhaps by a spent match Peter Black inserted in 1971 or a shrivelled potato chip left behind by Asa Briggs. As for the one or two specific issues Scannell and Cardiff are able to enlarge upon, notably the treatment of unemployment and poverty, they have done so by venturing beyond the ...”

“... and that she was officiously being kept alive, although rumoured to be comatose, to have turned black and to have shrivelled to the size of a doll. The ancient Marchesa began shaking with laughter and continued until tears ran down her cheeks. She managed to pull herself together, but as Blackwood was leaving, started to laugh again as she tried to ...”

“... be shown to be more important than my life.’ Nora distinguishes the Woman Upstairs from the black man in a ‘Ralph Ellison basement full of light bulbs’ or ‘the madwomen in the attic’. The Woman Upstairs is ‘the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful ...”

“... point, which Miller doesn’t make but seems just as important, is that there was no tradition of black abolitionism in France, nothing like the public-speaking circuits and abolitionist press that produced such figures as Frederick Douglass and Olaudah Equiano.) There is no equivalent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Miller writes, ‘no singularly influential ...”

“... Wife), 20th-century France (The Statement) and the Jesuit missions in 17th-century Quebec (Black Robe). Each of these places is evoked in prose possessed of that cutting edge of vividness which enabled Moore to write thrillers as well as mainstream fiction. In Black Robe his surgical directness can be ...”

“... and went to Buckingham Palace to watch the Changing of the Guard, then went to look at the glossy black door of 10 Downing Street for the first time. For lunch, she ate what she fancied – salad, cheesecake and not one, not two, but three glasses of bitter lemon – and for once had not cooked any of it. Then she bought a plastic policeman’s hat and a ...”

“... As an example of this kind of text, he cited the James Bond novels. Eco’s approach to Ian Fleming in this book was welcome for its critical gusto and its sense that he had really enjoyed the novels (by a sweet irony, Sean Connery would later take the lead in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film of The Name of the Rose). But he maintained, nonetheless, a ...”

“... to savour its violence. Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers is another painting in the imaginary Black Museum. This harem scene, featuring three serene, richly clad, seated women and one standing woman, was not painted with an innocent eye. Far from it, it is really rather sinister, for it ‘passes for objective fact or scientific fact, and, at the same ...”

“... On this level, their activities echo the pre-pubertal world of Our Gang. Behind the metaphorical black mask there is an organisation through which leading politicians, but chiefly ministers, communicate. It is a process by which, albeit in roundabout style, they submit their thoughts to the litmus test of public opinion. What offends the critics is that none ...”

“... newspapers and journals (the line of influential poetry reviewing stretches from Edward Thomas to Ian Hamilton). Sooner or later, the taste which innovating literary journalists shape and enforce seeps through to institutions of higher education, which then disseminate it to their students, many of whom transmit it to the next generation of ...”

“... Brian Redhead and David Butler. At least I have now seen a swingometer, although since the set was black and white, I only learned the following day that the arrow was neon purple. I have also seen David Dimbleby trying to build bricks with straw, when by midnight he still had only four results and was hard pushed to find enough of interest to say about them ...”

“... kind of superiority to fashion, publicity, even print itself. Sterne affected no such loftiness. Ian Campbell Ross’s new biography provides an introductory cameo of Sterne’s triumph of self-marketing. He made himself available to his admirers, the measure and embodiment of his fictional imagination. After a week he was writing home to say he was ...”

“... This morning there is a man in a short black coat running across a high brick wall; a hunchbacked fly springing sticky-fingered from perch to perch, before dropping heavily into the street. The wall – weathered yellow brick grouted with carbon deposits and grime – is enough of a barrier to have doubled in television films, cop shows or faked documentaries as the exterior of a prison ...”