“... the summer to a special edition of his journal, Die Fackel, called ‘The End of the World in Black Magic’, and began to vivisect the war and its useful idiots (using their own words) in his encyclopedic and devastating play The Last Days of Mankind. It is telling that most of the critics Jasper cites ended up fleeing to neutral Switzerland (or being ...”

“... of salient information from internet noise through ‘deep dreaming’ (she riffs on the Christopher Nolan movie from 2010). Further, Steyerl urges us to marshal these skills in a new mode of interventionist interpretation, but it isn’t clear at what level it is to be conducted: ‘pattern recognition’ suggests it should occur on the noisy ...”

“... Bacon took her to a ‘bad street’, what she saw was a place ‘just crammed with people, mostly black people, walking on the sidewalks and sitting on the stoops and leaning out of the windows’. In the ‘good one’, by contrast, there was just a lone boy kicking a tyre into a gutter. ‘Ed, nobody’s here,’ she said to Bacon, according to Robert ...”

“... retailed with rapt pedantry – is inconceivable without Joyce’s example: ‘A young woman in a black dress, with a shiny forehead and quick, wandering eyes, sat down at his feet for the eighth time, sideways on a stool, numbly extracted a narrow shoe from the rustling interior of its box, spread her elbows apart as she slackened the edges, glanced ...”

“... unblushingly tried. He committed to a debtors’ prison (where he died) the by then demented poet Christopher Smart whom in past years he had befriended and helped. When the Duchess of Kingston, a close friend of his former patron the Duke of Newcastle, was indicted before the House of Lords for bigamy, Mansfield took the unprecedented step of granting her ...”

“... Harriet, for England and Caroline Blackwood; The Dolphin tells, as he put it in a letter to Christopher Ricks, ‘the story of changing marriages, not a malice or sensation, far from it, but necessarily, according to my peculiar talent, very personal. Lizzie is naturally very much against it. I am considering publication in about a year; it needn’t be ...”

“... Revolution, has a sparkling chapter on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and another on the ‘black experience’ of Empire by Philip Morgan. But broadly speaking, the radical historians of Empire – David Killingray, Peter Sluglett, Nicholas Tarling – have been confined to the final, historiographical volume, while the more conservative have been ...”

“... sitting there. So, they sit there while Hossein’s chicken burns, and the walls of the trench go black with the smoke, and they carry on sitting there until the stove runs out of kerosene.’ Mr Amini was sucking in, making a rasping sound. It’s the sound badly gassed men make when they’re trying to hold their emotions in check. We’d reached Hossein ...”

“... may be dubious, it cannot be denied that it yields some interesting insights. Terence Hawkes, Christopher Norris and Jacqueline Rose show how the attempts of some influential Shakespeare critics to reduce the plays to coherent unified structures break down as the gaps and contradictions of the texts are carried over by an uncanny transfer to their own ...”

“... and moved into a set of images and cadences that I could not fully understand: It is as though The black breathing that billows her sleep, her name, Drugged under judgment, waned and – bearing daggers And balances – down the lampless darkness they came, Moving like women: Justice, Truth, such figures.‘Figures’ rhymes, of course, with ‘daggers’, but ...”

“... if Waller intends to demonstrate that the shallow ‘lookist’ he’s playing, whose grammar is black vernacular – ‘I hates you ‘cause your feet’s too big’ – also has the King’s English at his disposal. Had he lived, he could have had a major acting career – the black Zero Mostel, a lambent ...”

“... worst; and he is now rather stronger than before. This became very clear last October, when Warren Christopher, the former US Secretary of State, categorically ruled out any possibility of oil sanctions. ‘There is no appetite for that,’ he said on the first leg of his five-nation African tour, even as he professed himself ‘troubled by the conduct of the ...”

“... in the context of his avowed admiration of Cézanne, to be a betrayal not an advance. In 1952 Christopher Isherwood gave E. M. Forster two bottles of claret and a painting by Vaughan. His work made an ideal gay to gay present; the male nude, or nude in landscape were his main, almost his only subjects, and the steady sale of his smaller works seems to ...”

“... that we attend PT wearing all our ‘kit’, except blankets. (I will never call a child of mine Christopher.) The same letter gives, incidentally, a clear view of the left-wing political position that Reed, for all his aristocratic fantasies, was never to abandon: ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘a good deal from Russia, of course, but rather joylessly: the ...”

“... Smith in the current issue of Baetyl. (This new journal coincidentally takes its name from the black stone into which the goddess Cybele metamorphosed in order to escape Zeus on one of his rampages – more flesh and stone in opposition.) Sennett follows the approach of Marcel Detienne in his brilliant The Gardens of Adonis and interprets these rituals as ...”