“... were as real to him as Joan of Arc’s voices, Blake’s angels or Elwood P. Dowd’s giant white rabbit, Harvey. Trollope’s obsession about his characters originates in the kind of trauma that classically deranges sensitive minds. His wretchedness as a schoolboy is famous from the extended descriptions of it in An Autobiography. He uses terms like ...”

“... as I did in the country of my skin, all the methods I used had to be acceptable to white observers.’Black Teacher was met with hostility when it first appeared. Gilroy was accused of boasting and of exaggerating the prejudice she had faced; for her part, she complained her account had been softened in the editing. In To Sir, with Love ...”

“... level of criminality, black men are said to be less likely to commit rape or abuse children than white men. Effeminate, handsome and macho heterosexual men have more opportunistic homosexual experience than other heterosexual men. The incidence of adultery relative to fornication has declined over time. The percentage of homosexual Roman Catholic priests has ...”

“... must be another of nature’s old con tricks. Another writer McGahern brings to mind is the poet Patrick Kavanagh. McGahern’s story ‘Bank Holiday’, despite its curious but endearing earnestness (‘I find myself falling increasingly into an unattractive puzzlement,’ the chief character says, ‘mulling over that old, useless chestnut What is ...”

“... The Cordon Bleu to the War is gone,     In the ranks of death you’ll find him. His snow-white apron is girded on     And his magic stove behind him. ‘Army beef,’ says the Cordon Bleu,     ‘Though a stupid bungler slays thee, One skilful hand thy steaks shall stew,     One artist’s pan shall braise thee.’ (That field ...”

“... family, worried by Wood’s courtship of their daughter Meraud, had him followed – by Mrs Patrick Campbell. But he struggled on regardless. He met Picasso, he even worked at painting though he was dissatisfied with the results and his output was small. By 1926 he had made a name for himself, which was, as he told his mother, the important thing. The ...”

“... death in 1946, he painted almost eighty more. Angora Cat carries a strange psychological charge. A white cat with electric yellow eyes sits on an Art Deco sofa, beneath a small figurine of a lion. The curvature of the couch warps the perspective and the cat is much too big for its seat. Its fur is made up of hundreds of tiny strokes of paint; the ...”

“... a little too short makes close ones blurred. Short and long sight are the first disabilities which Patrick Trevor-Roper discusses in The World through Blunted Sight, his newly-revised exploration of the effect of eye-defects on personality, art and literature. He endorses T. Rice’s epitomes of short and long-sighted personalities which, made some sixty years ...”

“... ever seen. His hair was slick, combed up to a glistening ridge; the lips were thin, the cheeks white. It looked as if someone had gone round his ears with a pencil. My Granda Michael looked like Glasgow: a place that felt far away by then, that sounded old and big and always in the dark. Just over twenty miles away from our coastal New Town of wall-heaters ...”

“... by the success of Abstract Expressionism, signifying a decisive defection from engagé figuration. Patrick Marnham enjoys Rivera’s murals, and describes them well, but he ignores or trivialises the wider aesthetic and political issues. Incredibly, he never mentions the Mexican School of Painting, which owed so much to Rivera’s style. He is more comfortable ...”

“... government jobs. What with the anonymous cruising sites of Lafayette Park (right in front of the White House) and the company of tolerant female colleagues in the federal bureaucracy, homosexuals managed to turn Washington into a ‘very gay city’. Hoover grew up in DC when it was a racist backwater of the Old South, and despite his own ambiguous ...”

“... and the bias of the liberal media. They are also personally courageous. In short, they’re an all-white, lower middle-class bunch of the kind you’d expect to see at the football or watching The X Factor, with the crucial difference that they are authorised to take away your liberty and can use physical force if you don’t agree to accompany them to the ...”

“... verb, and occupiers defied the restrictive policing that normally kept city centre areas clean for white-collar workers and tourists. Inside the space, people made decisions on a directly democratic basis, gathering in general assemblies where consensus was supposed to substitute for majority rule, and demands to existing authorities were explicitly ...”

“... used to criminalise young black men. In a study published in 2016, the criminologists Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke wrote that while only a fraction of ‘serious youth violence’ offences in London and Manchester were committed by black people (27 per cent and 6 per cent respectively), most of those on the gang matrices in both cities were ...”

“... characters; interrogating motives; pushing beyond his own facility at phrase-making (‘clouds white as cricketers’, the moon ‘like a button on a blazer’) to find plain words for what he has learned. As in any family history, the story at the heart of Blood-Dark Track is the writer’s own, the drama of his struggle to open a path from the present to ...”