“... Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger Thomas, the murderous anti-hero of Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son; Baldwin wrote that ‘Mr Himes seems capable ...”

“... It is an experience in having no traditions to live up to.’ One winter in the early 1990s I took an overnight train from Georgia to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. There were no planes: Armenia was at war with its neighbour Azerbaijan, and under blockade. Snow came through the ill-fitting windows of the sleeper as it trundled between steep little ...”

“... Pavese was met with the news that Tina had married the boyfriend she had been seeing before she took up with him. He wrote: ‘Left alone, I’ve tried it, I know I won’t make it. Made one flesh and one destiny with her, I would have succeeded, I’m sure.’ Ten years later, the day after another lover married, Pavese wrote: ‘What happens once, happens ...”

“... host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s visit – Dorothy Thompson’s English Journey, now deservingly out of print – he envisioned the ‘scene that would have been played out’ if she had been as good a ...”

“... the local maquis in sabotage operations. Although he thought of himself as a ‘pacifist’, he took satisfaction in resisting the Occupation. ‘For the first time, I no longer felt totally helpless over the death of my mother and my friend Jean. At least I had the feeling of avenging them.’In October 1943, the rafle came to Vire. Salomon Kaminsky and ...”

“... What could be grander than lounging around upstairs, nibbling at the stock when the fancy took you, brushing out your curls? She and Katie would still spend hour upon hour getting ready to go out – to Cardiff, or to Pontypridd, to some tea-shop, or to the pictures – recapturing the world of their girlhood, before men and money had turned ...”

“... creative impulse), it was not out of the desire to register the world around him. His friend John le Gay Brereton could see the importance of Henry Lawson. Brennan couldn’t. He had no interest in the bush, the Labour movement or Australian nationalism. In the Australian Nineties, a period which self-consciously but justifiably felt itself to be alive ...”

“... He had followed instead the course of apprenticeship, a different kind of education: one which took place in a commercial workshop, taught artisan skills rather than intellectual ones, and was conducted in Italian rather than Latin. His description of himself as ‘unlettered’ is in part a sardonic celebration of this more practical form of learning. It ...”

“... and Shepherd would probably remove. In what he referred to as ‘an obvious diagnosis’, Rodinson took Israeli statehood to be the ‘culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the great European-American movement of expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other peoples or to dominate them economically and ...”

“... small and marginal players. Brazil was the only country where a sizeable fascist movement took root: the Ação Integralista Brasileira (Brazilian Integralist Action), which by the late 1930s had around 400,000 members. There was no fascist remaking of the old order as in Germany, Italy or Spain. The traditional pillars of elite rule, especially the ...”

“... husband, Asif Zardari, would act as regent. The general election, postponed following her death, took place in February. The immediate impact of the stunning electoral defeat suffered by General Musharraf’s political party and his factotums was to dispel the disillusionment of the citizenry. Not for long. Musharraf is still clinging on to the ...”

“... just as overloaded, pulling into Valletta from Benghazi and heavy with men looking for work. I took a seat on the wooden benches of the first-class section. Over in the VIP lounge, the Chinese businessmen from my flight were relaxing over an ample supply of alcohol. But we had entertainment too, flickering across a small TV screen: a dramatic re-enactment ...”

“... 1s, and not a single copy, it seems, had been sold. That same year, 1861, Rossetti and Swinburne took it up with enthusiasm. Across the Atlantic, the American artist Elihu Vedder, a specialist in antiquarian Eastern fantasies, whose writhing snakes of healing wisdom and forbidding, yet full-breasted, goddesses of scholarship, history and memory still greet ...”

“... grave in the churchyard at Longtown, on the Anglo-Scottish border north of Carlisle. She took very ill the least suggestion that there might be some doubt about its authenticity. Much of the phenomenon must be ascribed to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Born some thirty years after the Norman Conquest, Geoffrey, with his Norman name and strong Welsh ...”

“... John Sayles’s film Lianna broke new ground in 1982 with its portrait of a young wife and mother who comes out as a lesbian. Equally ground-breaking was a scene early in the film in which Lianna’s husband, a philandering, self-obsessed academic, suggests that she have sex with him. Lianna looks at him with a mixture of indulgence and exasperation and says: ‘I’ll go put the thing in ...”