“... of Prussia was unknown; and in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.’ ‘Evil’? ‘Wickedness’? The ability to employ these terms without awkwardness or embarrassment has declined, while the capacity of modern ...”

“... Irish, whose communities have had the greatest experience of political disadvantage and unrest. Black poets here are less reluctant than white to give vent to their frustrations – they don’t recognise didacticism as a ‘problem’. Nor does Tom Paulin, who as a critic is much concerned with British and Irish politics, and as a poet mixes references to ...”

“... back in Derry, fired up by Marxist-Leninist revolutionary ideology as well as admiration for the Black Panthers and the Aldermaston protesters. Later came ‘a Sorbonne-inspired belief in spontaneity’. McCann describes the atmosphere in the nationalist areas of Derry in the early 1960s as one of resentment and resignation. The city was effectively ...”

“... that a man could disappear while lying still in a peat bog – just as long as he was wearing black boots, a stone-coloured cap, a waistcoat the colour of a peat hag and knickerbockers as green as grass. It was not until December 1915 that Solomon was asked to visit the French camouflage workshop at Amiens, and to join others in developing a British ...”

“... else involved in the inquest. The Cass Report wouldn’t be published until 2010, a year after Ian Tomlinson died, having wandered into the protests against the G20 summit and been struck on the leg and pushed to the ground by a police officer. Tomlinson’s death encouraged Peach’s family to ask again for the Cass Report to be released. Paul ...”

“... asserting that he was the victim of a London faggot literary coterie, consisting of Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and myself. (Amis and I contemplated a letter to the Face, saying that this was very unfair to Ian Hamilton, but then dumped the idea.) Now here is Mailer attempting the near-impossible: that is to say, a novel ...”

“... he painted across his own features a Kathakali mask of violent emotions, the grinning red, black and silver face of a tormented demon. This, his text declared with great cries of guilt, was the real Olivier: but what readers took in primarily was the enormous theatrical energy and gusto of the breast-beating. It was as if A. A. Milne’s Tigger, for ...”

“... than two decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a ...”

“... his house, usually separated from the sea by an expanse of marsh, until his torch beam met the black writhe of water. It sounded, he said later, like something boiling.The land itself was reshaped. Hugh Drake, a farmer at Friskney on the coast north of Boston, lost 25 acres when the sea breached his private dyke. He had to build a new sea wall further ...”

“... Polish orphanages after the Armistice, the child psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld wrote that ‘the black misery of prisoners of war is very like the depressions of infancy.’ The study of the adult mind disordered by war helped encourage a fuller elaboration of the psychic life of the child, which itself seemed to be characterised by disturbance and the ...”

“... her supporters say, and is happening because she’s a Christian or an evangelical or a woman. Ian Blackford, the MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, who was leader of the SNP in the House of Commons until last year, is also a Free Church member. Why didn’t his religious beliefs warrant the same attention? The reason is that Blackford’s voting record and ...”

“... Fascism sharpened their national consciousness into radical activism. They included Russel Ward, Ian Turner and Bob Gollan, who were all Communists when they embarked on their careers. Their influence on Australian history was perhaps even greater than that of their British equivalents, Hill, Thompson, Hobsbawm and Rudé, since they were there at the ...”

“... in many novelists today, particularly younger ones, who recognise the current literary value of a black world view but themselves possess cheerful, even sunny temperaments. They turn out The Good Companions in reverse, well aware that their escapist world will seem as convincing to today’s readers as Priestley’s did to subscribers in the Thirties. The ...”

“... the Labour Party and leftist groups generally were received with suspicion, if not resentment, by black people, who feel rejected by the very institutions which might be expected to fight most vigorously on their behalf. Rex now directs the SSRC Ethnic Relations Unit at the University of Aston and he and his colleagues there have not been afraid to confront ...”

“... does its opposite, a sort of demonic gypsy sexuality). He is a very sexy writer. Compared to, say, Ian McEwen or Martin Amis he is not very outspoken: there is something prurient about the way he closes the bedroom door on his couples, a sort of blindfold voyeurism. No doubt this springs from and reflects the claustrophobic puritanism of the society he writes ...”