“... of Memoirs of a Revolutionist, was a paragraph which put the case very deftly (the reviewer was Ian Watt, author of The Rise of the Novel): Macdonald has genuine analytic power, but he is perhaps best as a satirist; with his quick allergy to cant he in many ways resembles Mencken, and has traces of the latter’s tendency to view the spectacle of human ...”

“... love, and then sails north at last, his boat weighted down with chairs, tables, and an upright black piano strapped and locked on deck, the varnish quickly warming as it flashes back the sun. But suppose everything weren’t a message or a sign? Then these poems would seem complacent in the possession of sentiments they haven’t earned. Or too happy in ...”

“... in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to ...”

“... days that shook the world’. It’s not much of an overstatement. Interviewed for the film Ian Hislop recalled wondering if this was what it felt like to be on the brink of civil war. For once Charles was ahead of his mother, insisting on taking the royal flight to Paris to bring the body back. For the queen, Diana, no longer HRH, was not part of the ...”

“... politics – for survival in the competitive, meritocratic postwar world. These habits included a black-and-white view of reality, moral certainty, and a healthy contempt for birth and breeding. Leavis was thus already a fine, intuitive polemicist and self-advertiser, who hardly needed much help from acolytes like Ford. The aggression built into the ...”

“... expects that the reader should see him. And here we are very much in the dark: not for nothing has Ian Jack, its meticulous editor, noted that ‘Wuthering Heights is one of the most enigmatic of English novels.’ Much depends on how Emily Brontë imagined her hero, as well as very skilfully creating him, and covering her authorial tracks. I would say that as ...”

“... Marius takes the story. His last pages relate to the late 1520s and are full of darkness and black depression, proleptic of an end which was still twenty years off. This is a pity. As the excellent Australian scholar Ian Siggins has shown, Old Man Luther is just as interesting a subject as Erikson’s Young Man ...”

“... by Attallah, a maid ‘on stiletto heels’ arrived with a ‘tiny gold-encrusted cup containing black coffee to which, under her master’s gaze, she added two drops of rose-water in the manner of a holy rite.’ Lovely young things rush about London when Attallah cries: ‘Find me an orchid, darling. I need an orchid – the best in town.’ The entourage ...”

“... the National Guard.And sometimes reality is just as wild as Pynchon’s exuberant imagination, as Ian Hamilton discovered while trying to write the biography of another famously elusive American author. Since J.D. Salinger, like Pynchon, refused all interviews, made no public appearances and was barely ever caught on camera, he was hardly likely to co-operate ...”

“... at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the colour of an Eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved.For the human ...”

“... to a £33.95 ticket and you get a glass of champagne to add fizz to your separation from the black-dot insects. I came here to swim in the highest pool in Europe, 52 floors above the station. The surface of this infinity pond, shivering with reflections like a Fun House mirror, memory-ripples of exercisers now taking their ease on Roman couches, sampling ...”

“... the more thoroughly it is embedded in narrative detail, the more difficult it is to make black and white judgments. This approach to ethics might be contrasted with the rule-governed morality of utilitarianism and the categorical imperative of Kant, purportedly applicable in all places and at all times. We should not draw the line between virtue and ...”

“... Alexander Cockburn​ blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941 ...”

“... of native collaborators, who in the eyes of nationalists were betraying their own people, like black policemen in South Africa today. A Russian who abandons his native land and settles in a hostile country is always credited with the most laudable motives, like the archetypal author of I chose freedom. An honest Soviet dissident like Sakharov ...”

“... Ireland in 1969 he admitted that he had failed ‘to break the chains of ancient hatreds’. Ian Paisley was on the rise, stirring up fear and bigotry among the Protestant working classes. The McConville children lived in a Protestant area but went to a Catholic school and to Mass, though Helen also went with Granny Murray to ‘happy ...”