“... to which he barked amiably. Monday 18 June 1956: I’ve just finished Tom Driberg’s life of Max Beaverbrook ... the Duke of Windsor virtually half-witted from first to last (no surprise to me). Monday 19 January 1959: The Windsors’ party was very gay. She certainly is a most charming hostess and he was extremely amiable. The conversation was mostly ...”

“... who will tell you with passion that things were better under the British, Portuguese or French. Black Zimbabweans who think life was better under Smith are already common. The crisis of tiers mondisme is part of the broader crisis of the Left to which, as Christiane Lemke and Gary Marks point out in their edited volume. The Crisis of Socialism in ...”

“... of the Hollywood exiles, ‘the aims of the Left were usually modest: to portray an intelligent black character or the erosions of unemployment, or even (although rarely) a woman who earned her own living.’ The most radical American films of the Forties, such as Body and Soul (1947), written by Polonsky and directed by Robert Rossen, or Polonsky’s Force ...”

“... to Tbilisi, cheerfully teasing the KGB and breaking the rules by changing currency on the black market, selling their old clothes – and in Reddaway’s case distributing a few Bibles. When in due course Reddaway decided to become an academic specialising in the Soviet Union, his activist interests were at least as strong as his scholarly ones. He ...”

“... nature’ of found images could furnish his painting was a lesson learned in part from Max Ernst, whose often cited comment on Magritte – that his ‘pictures are collages entirely painted by hand’ – the younger Surrealist came to resent, probably because it was spot on.Magritte studied painting, intermittently, with local artists and ...”

“... some unforgettable incidents in this collection: when the raffish Wasp viciously pulls rank on the black pianist; when the strange, lonely little boy rewards his teacher’s kindness by drawing an obscene caricature of her on the wall; when the girl from the typing pool sees that her impending marriage will be a passionless compromise; when the alcoholic ...”

“... first half of the 20th century. Unlike the ‘Phage Church’ established by the German emigré Max Delbrück in the US in the 1940s – which aimed to do genetics with very rapidly growing bacterial viruses (bacteriophages or ‘phages’) in order to determine the nature of the gene – the biometrical/statistical school focused on how genes behaved and ...”

“... cage Waugh would not rattle. Sometimes it was just for fun. He could be, as his former colleague Max Hastings put it, ‘manically mischievous’. At others he would make a point with Swiftian savagery, as in July 1977 when the Gay News trial came to court. Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner against the ‘permissive society’, had brought a private ...”

“... Yet justice demands that everyone be treated equally; such slogans as ‘I am a man’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ express this basic egalitarianism. The problem and the pain of love is that, for all of us, some people matter infinitely more than others.Any reckoning with the affective qualities of justice must also weigh the importance of more ...”

“... 1940s (John Huston, not Hitchcock and Hawks) and ‘natural’ foreign directors like Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls and Vittorio de Sica. In 1967, she lamented the frustrated career of Orson Welles, someone who could ‘unify’ educated and uneducated audiences – the quality that makes movies ‘a great popular art form’.If I felt that Kael was addressing my ...”

“... under. The ocean seemed to shudder. When I came up again a column of smoke was rising, treacle-black, above the headland to the east.’ When she gets back to the house she finds Cahun less dismayed than she had expected. Claude was standing on the grass bank that overlooked the beach. The hose lay on the lawn behind her, water rushing from the ...”

“... riots of a different kind in Liverpool, when white mobs attacked an Anglo-Indian restaurant and a black seamen’s hostel on consecutive nights. At the end of the war, Britain was an almost exclusively white society. By 1954, the number of non-whites in the country still stood at a mere 40,000, but immigration was already a political problem. ‘There is a ...”

“... was that the epigram was not true: Palestine already had a people. On belatedly discovering this, Max Nordau, Herzl’s friend and follower, exclaimed to his leader: ‘we are committing an injustice.’ Much later Arthur Ruppin, who directed Zionist colonisation in the 1920s, warned ‘that Herzl’s concept of a Jewish state was only possible because he ...”

“... present in return, having made various attempts to procure acceptable underwear for her (not black! not pantaloons!) on his regiment’s first arrival in Italy, and before that in the markets of Tunis. ‘Oh! Darling, I’m afraid you will be horribly disappointed in the undies when they arrive, as they’re neither very smart nor of good material ...”

“... fantastical, Isak Dinesen-like results. (She once had her eyelids tattooed to look like blue-black eyeliner.) She is still in love – in a distant way – with George Clooney, though playing with the Paint program on her computer (adapted for low vision) and writing the news every day to her pals in the Brit Group, a gossipy little chat room for elderly ...”