“... The last word of the novel recalls Conrad. The Heart of Darkness is, however, a risky model. As Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now suggest, its invoked presence can leach the life out of any presumptuous rewriting, converting it into so much anaemic homage. Graham Greene tells us that in his apprentice days he found The Heart ...”

“... Lange and Arthur Rothstein, folklorists working for the Library of Congress, the economist Paul Taylor, the sociologist Carey McWilliams, and even Woodie Guthrie, who provided the words and music. The migrants were ‘plain-folks’, patriotic Americans, individualistic, distrustful of big government and big solutions to their problems, Shindo ...”

“... She was part kangaroo and part prizefighter. A woman made of rubber, a female Tarzan,’ wrote Paul Colin, who sketched her for La Revue nègre. Baker’s notorious horizontal movements were propelling her to the top of the world. Hers was the American dream, the assimilationist success story that (as Tylor Stovall argues in Paris Noir: African Americans ...”

“... evidence as to his age and appearance was contradictory. More than 130 suspects are listed in Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner’s authoritative The Jack the Ripper A to Z (1991). Curtis claims that Ripperologists have ‘brought us no closer to the real culprit than did the exertions of Scotland Yard in 1888’, but he is unduly dismissive of ...”

“... In 1890, the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac offered to paint Félix Fénéon, the very coiner, four years previously, of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’. The critic-subject responded with modest evasiveness, and then a proviso: ‘I will express only one opinion: effigy absolutely full-face – do you agree?’ Signac did not agree ...”

“... over a presidential campaign decades after the FLN took to the gun.New and shiny, Macron hopes to lay this difficulty to rest. It is more than sixty years since the Algerian war began and the time is right, even if no one is willing to take the step: shame is a major obstacle, and perhaps also the worry that an apology would lead to calls for proof of ...”

“... incomes policy and labour legislation, precedes the authors’ general conclusions. The lay reader will need to labour hard to derive meaning from this massive study. Its statistical detail is overwhelming. The preoccupation with a historical record concluding a decade ago is perplexingly antiquarian, given the radical changes which have occurred ...”

“... an inconvenience! If a purported science, or indeed any secular discipline, can’t satisfactorily lay out the grounds on which outsiders should accept its propositions, that should prove by itself to be an eventually terminal defect. Its most serious consequences will be felt within the discipline, for theorists will not be able to settle their differences on ...”

“... Ortona,​ Christmas Eve, 1943. A thriving Adriatic port only days previously, it now lay in ruins. The population of ten thousand was gone. In their place were two battalions of elite Fallschirmjäger – German paratroopers – defending what was left of the town, and the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, who were under orders to take it ...”

“... certainly thought so. Nkrumah was in no doubt. He invited Padmore to Ghana. Together they would lay the groundwork for a Pan-Africanist International and turn Accra into its continental HQ.Padmore’s experience of Nkrumah’s Ghana was mixed. Two shifts in Pan-Africanist ideology took place during his lifetime (he died in 1959). Like Du Bois, the movement ...”

“... by Indian soldiers in a small, suffocating cell in the city. It refers to the unsayable that lay, and still often lies, at the heart of the colonial encounter, the breakdown in the Western observer’s language when he or she attempts to describe a different culture, the mouth open but the words unable to take form. In Western literature, the unsayable ...”

“... he was rushed by an enormous Great Dane. He calculated at once that his only possible escape lay in leaping over the speeding dog, but it was already too late; before he could launch himself he fell head first and was struck senseless. On waking, he had a feeling of actually coming to himself: ‘I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful ...”

“... The Felskian postcritic slices through the supposed divide between detached, academic reading and lay reading with pleasure. These caricatures aren’t new, of course, though proponents of postcriticism argue that literary theory has pressured such concepts over the past fifty years.What postcritical reading claims to offer is a solution: tuning back in to ...”

“... Cezanne, I suspect, tough Aixois businessman, tight paymaster to his disappointing son Paul. Look, papa, no less than you I am a free man, my art is at no one’s service. ‘The word employé seems disgusting to me,’ Cezanne wrote aged 29. The early work – tenebrous fantasias such as The Murder, painted at much the same period in his life ...”

“... detail to convince us that this was no trivial threat. Drawing on the work of Don Fehrenbacher and Paul Finkelman, McPherson also presents a very clear explanation of the significance of the Dred Scott case, in which the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Taney declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional, and added for good measure that when the ...”