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“... that follow were indeed first spoken by Democritus. In his 1989 book on plagiarism, Stolen Words, Thomas Mallon excoriated the academic special pleading that elevated Sterne and Coleridge from literary shoplifters into masters of bricolage and intertextuality. Their cases are analysed along with that of the Victorian novelist Charles Reade, and the American ...”

“... to this? Early on, Howe focuses on the key figure of Edward Wilmot Blyden, who was born in St Thomas in the West Indies in 1832 but lived much of his life in Sierra Leone. Even before the European Scramble for Africa, Blyden formulated the essential problem faced by people of African descent. Should they argue that they are identical with Europeans but ...”

“... stories: ‘Instead of Pinocchio, Joe McCarthy; instead of Uncle Remus, tales of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King.’ Even Alexander Portnoy is a trusted aide to New York City’s liberal mayor John Lindsay, a tribune of the Great Society. In the thick of his erotic adventures, he can’t help remembering how he spent his childhood listening to ‘marching ...”

“... Sometimes the poets would get up and dance. A singer in a broad-shouldered suit, looking like Dean Martin or Max Bygraves, would swagger in and improvise verses: these were often satirical comments on state interference with independent-minded Arabs. The poets admired these witticisms very much. At the Baghdad Shooting Club (hard by the Baghdad Horsemen’s ...”

“... glamour and splendour. Among the more solid figures who appear on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not ...”

“... the closure of the studio marked the end of an epoch truncated by the assassination in Memphis of Martin Luther King: ‘the climate for an integrated business in a black neighbourhood changed.’ You can see what Marcus is talking about when he says the civil rights movement looks different in retrospect – but not because of anything to do with Elvis ...”

“... with a mural featuring several famous figures – among them, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. At its centre, though, five times the size of the others, is a stern-looking man with bushy, neatly parted grey hair, wearing a frock-coat and necktie. Two hundred years after his birth into slavery, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and ...”

“... and drowsy hammocks’, and Youth (which contained Heart of Darkness), reviewed by William Beach Thomas, who had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s death, Francis Gribble magniloquently wavered on the fine point of the Russian’s stature: ‘he may or may not have been a man of genius.’ Too ...”

“... holdings. Painters too engaged in the collecting of drawings, one of the most successful being Thomas Lawrence, several of whose drawings are in the exhibition. Just how little value was attached to Michelangelo’s working material on paper is shown by the fate of the cartoon he made around 1504 for the Battle of Cascina, which was to be the companion ...”

“... not elsewhere in Europe? They sought an answer by delving deep into German history, as far back as Martin Luther, or even to the tribes analysed in Tacitus’ ethnography Germania. A version of this model was developed in the 1970s by the so-called Bielefeld School of leftish German historians, led by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, who saw the failure ...”

“... not alone in deploring the satanic mills of early industrialism. Southern critics of the American Thomas Gradgrinds and Josiah Bounderbys relied on the documentation of reformers and on public reports, not on their own investigations. Furthermore, Thoreau or Hawthorne could be as critical of the age of rail, steam and smokestack as any slaveholding ...”

“... childhood, are written in a strain of hyperbole, sometimes as pleasingly Welsh as Dylan or Gwyn Thomas. Before we reach the third section, about his pre-war adventures among Arabs, Cubans and Sicilians, we have been astonished by his weird boyhood in Carmarthen and Enfield, where his experiences seem scarcely less bizarre and exotic. We no longer think of ...”

“... of PCP, she was forgiven. Bradley, who, at 74, is much older than he looks, belongs to the Martin Luther King ‘one race, the human race’ party. Unlike Gates, he has frequently been accused of condoning financial wrong-doing and cronyism in his administration. The LAPD may be incorruptible, but there is no question that some rooms in City Hall can ...”

“... appearance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Hellfire Nation the quintessential American statesman is not Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, but the anti-smut campaigner Anthony Comstock. The Comstock Act of 1873 outlawed from the federal mail any ‘obscene, lewd or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print or other publication of an indecent character or ...”

“... the night sky, riven with fire and the beams of searchlights, is more like a Turner or a John Martin. Further down St James’s Street, on the opposite pavement from where a club that is more or less Brooks’s has been bombed, ‘a group of progressive novelists in firemen’s uniform were squirting a little jet of water into the morning room … “It ...”