“... was my master.’ Ten years later he said his father might have been a mulatto. In other words, as Henry Louis Gates put it, Douglass ‘completely diminished the whiteness and the masterness of his father over ten years’. In his 1854 essay ‘The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered’, Douglass stated baldly that ‘intellect is uniformly derived ...”

“... also need to be understood on their own terms. Smith’s disciples, Pitt the Younger and Henry Dundas, whom conventional historiography labels as Tory and who led the forces of anti-Jacobin reaction during the 1790s, supported liberal reform in the 1780s, never abjured Whiggery and went on to champion the cause of Catholic Emancipation. Not only did ...”

“... racism, given at a 1943 New York rally on a bill with Paul Robeson and Vice-President Henry Wallace. Welles’s debut as a political orator was as sensational in its way as his first forays into theatre and the movies. ‘Until the other day,’ the New Yorker noted, ‘we regarded Orson Welles as simply an ...”

“... said, ‘that when we had hardly been a year wearing broadcloth at court in mourning for King Henry II, silks had already sunk so low in everyone’s opinion that if you saw anyone dressed in them you immediately set them down as a bourgeois.’ Though the copywriters would like to have us believe that one instinctively knows when something is right, in ...”

“... rather than men in grey suits to get out its message. It used endorsements from the boxer Henry Cooper and the gold medal-winning Olympic pentathlete Mary Peters; from subsidiary groupings such as Actors for Europe, which included Arthur Lowe and Richard Briers, and Writers for Europe, whose membership ranged from Agatha Christie to ...”

“... the progress of human improvement”.’ But, apart from the elevated tone, that is plain Tom Paine talk, to be found in any reform publication of the time. Then Roe tells the reader, some thirty pages on, that the scheme for the Philanthropist was ‘never realised’. Wordsworth, writing to Mathews on 7 November 1794, had agreed that they must ...”

“... ambiguity, because it confounds moral life with doctrine or dogma. We need only the reminder of Henry James, who, while cautioning against any ‘moral restrictions set upon the field of consciousness’, affirmed the moral character of art: ‘to count out the moral element in one’s appreciation of an artistic total is exactly as sane as it would be (if ...”

“... him in one or another species of white condescension Either he would have to reinforce the Uncle Tom figure smiling through his suffering in All God’s chillun and (repeatedly) Show Boat, or unwittingly valorise the sentiments of British Imperialism in the Korda brothers’ film of Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River. Then there was Othello, also written ...”

“... ambiguous Grail consists – as befits a banned author of the Thirties and a former associate of Henry Miller – of ‘love-lore’ or the secrets of sex. These, which have something to do with ‘dual control’ in the love-act and simultaneous orgasm, are passed down from master or mistress to hand-picked pupil in certain rare and long-delayed bouts of ...”

“... first successful literary weekly. It was founded not by a political faction but by a publisher, Henry Colburn, anxious to get exposure for his products. Colburn perceived the need for a newspaper whose news was books. The quarterlies’ ‘principle of selection’ was repudiated in favour of comprehensive coverage of the literature of the ...”

“... in Mr Grigson’s extracts. An analogous feeling comes through in a poem Mr Grigson does print, Henry Carey’s ‘Namby-Pamby’, which is in fact directed at one of Pope’s dunces (‘Namby-Pamby, pilly-piss, /Rhimy-pimed on Missy Miss’). The whole poem is an exuberant orchestration of the nagging sing-song of mocking children. It is blended with some ...”

“... a culinary context, was christening a kind of milk jelly ‘Maschler pudding’. This was because Tom Maschler, who had been her editor at Cape, turned down her latest novel at the end of the Sixties on the grounds that it was ‘the kind of thing people no longer wanted to read’. Barbara had no malice, but sharp in her novels and diary she wonderfully ...”

“... how to pray’ – and when discussing the right way to do things he’d bring in Shakespeare or Henry James. As he saw it, the modernist emphasis on technique was a reaction to a loss of the finer feelings that real art required, a loss caused chiefly by excessive frankness about sex. This threw an ennobling light on crime fiction: since love stories ...”

“... by his informal editorial panel, his publisher John Murray and the odd couple of John Sparrow and Tom Driberg. Sparrow was a grammarian pedant, ‘a great which-hunter’, as Murray put it, while Driberg watched the tenses and any surfeit of sentiment like a hawk. ‘If that’s what heaven’s like it won’t be bad’ was, for Driberg, rather ‘in the ...”

“... could be stamped on instead. Few favourites lasted a reign, let alone a regime change. As Sir Henry Wotton said, ‘the state of a favourite is at the best but a tenant-at-will.’ Favourites could find themselves out of favour, they could overreach or be pulled down by envy. That astute observer of Stuart monarchs, John Milton, has his Satan describe ...”