“... each time. But Moore now commanded great respect in the black community, and many were shocked by his arrest. A giant man, heavy, broad and tall, he appeared imperturbable and unimpeachable – and yet he was Coleman’s prize, the alleged kingpin of Tulia’s drug trade. Another of those arrested was Donnie Smith. Charismatic, a former star athlete, he ...”

“... the public imagination, supposedly demonstrating that there are absolute limits to what can be known. More specifically, it is thought to tell us that there are mathematical truths which can never be proved. These are among the misconceptions that proliferate around Gödel’s theorem and its ...”

“... The Black Scarab. In December 1929, Jacob Morrow won fourth prize in a short-story competition run by the Hampshire Telegraph. Soon afterwards, she began to sign her work O.M. Manning, but it was as Olivia Manning that in 1937 she published The Wind Changes with Jonathan Cape. In being acquired by Cape, Manning made an ...”

“... attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.’ The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen: among ...”

“... The classic narrative begins with the court battles and grassroots protests against Jim Crow. By the end of the 19th century, the Southern states had implemented a system of nearly complete racial separation in the public sphere. Blacks and whites attended segregated schools. On streetcars, buses and trains, ‘coloured’ travellers sat separately and ...”

“... Allen Ginsberg’s Beat vision-quest came through England in the spring of 1965, I was appointed by this famous renegade minstrel to set down his legend for the Paris Review. Ginsberg’s last words in our interview came in response to an inquiry about the role of command in the compositional process. Sometimes when he was at work on his poems, he declared ...”

“... the converted Oxo Tower Wharf, thus lengthening the Thames Path, so that eventually there would be pedestrian access all the way to Blackfriars Bridge and beyond, to the new Globe Theatre and now, of course, to the old Bankside Power Station – also the work of Giles Gilbert Scott – or Tate Modern. After my second trip to this astonishingly successful ...”

“... look the odder it gets. There is, at least superficially, a limit to this. Facts, so belaboured by Post-Modernism, prove pertinacious in the face of atrocity. It’s notable that the dogma of social constructionism, lately so infarcted in cultural and literary studies, has had little to say about the creation of ‘the Holocaust’, long dignified with the ...”

“... both McLeod’s voice and McGahern’s are recognisably inflected, in certain patterned stresses, by a common Gaelic linguistic inheritance. MacLeod needs McGahern to introduce him because, unlike McGahern, he was, until recently, still a writer with a small, loyal following at home, rather than an international reputation. In thirty years he has produced two ...”

“... number of the literary critics dwelled on the fear of tyranny that was voiced in (and around) 1614 by poets and historians, an anxiety given focus by the breakdown of the short-lived Parliament that was called in the spring and by the imprisonment of the Crown’s principal critics within ...”

“... Antrim’s first novel, Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World: I keep seeing Jim’s face, lit red by tail lights, in the long moments before the lines snapped taut, while Bill Nixon tried and retried to start his fume-spewing, out-of-tune Celica. It was all so profoundly uncomfortable; there was nothing to do but toe the grass and stare up at the stars in the ...”

“... the reunited Germany of today. One of them, the beguiling exhibition at the British Museum curated by Barrie Cook, displays objects of many kinds, from the wooden sculptures made in the late 15th century by Tilman Riemenschneider to the metallic icon of the Volkswagen Beetle, in order to address the question of Germany’s ...”

“... into the first, it needn’t. As a form of words, it’s ordinary, so for it to zing there has to be some sort of voice behind it: ‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York’ (The Bell Jar). Good ones can do ordinary and extraordinary at once; they can do the novel in ...”

“... were not so beautiful. They were a strangely squat, ragged-faced crew for a 16-year-old girl to be ogling; from plain to downright ugly, if you don’t count Glen Ford or Dana Andrews (who weren’t exactly Paul Newman or Montgomery Clift themselves). My generation have Cahiers du cinéma, Godard and Truffaut to thank for the earlier generation of movie ...”

“... use cobbles imported from China, in a landscape of good Scottish stone?). The rhetoric of hope (‘be part of better’) is what brought Alex Salmond and the SNP their immense victory. Greenock and Inverclyde was one of the very few Scottish working-class constituencies to stay with Labour, but only just: the SNP vote boiled up to come less than 2 per cent ...”