“... Imposture, how it burns, through generations: how it is burnt up; for a time. The World is black ashes; – which, ah, when will they grow green? Readers brought up on the cadences of the Old Testament, even on Milton, may have found this easier to respond to than we do. Carlyle’s own prose is rather like the uncontrollable fires it ...”

“... of doubt that was lost in his transcription. Now, in a new critical edition by Ian Forrest and Christopher Whittick, the visitation book is available in full translation for the first time.* As they write: ‘It is not an objective record of what was happening in medieval parishes, being in fact much more fascinating than that.’ In 1397 the visitors ...”

“... for what uttered the words was a kind of swimming agglutination of mascara, rouge, green tinting, black teeth, and hair like the plumage in a deserted crow’s nest.’ On stage in private performances, virtually naked, he makes a marginally better impression: ‘He surprised us by leaping without the least warning, almost like an athlete, to the very front ...”

“... By the late Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay ...”

“... Persons, the first volume of his celebrated Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), William Black stone concluded his account of how the law makes a husband and wife one person by suggesting that the legal disappearance of the married Englishwoman was effectively a tribute to her sex. ‘These are the chief legal effects of marriage during the ...”

“... field of literature like a meteorite out of a cloudless sky, our very own qibla, our inscrutable Black Stone. That the first surviving Western poetry, born within a generation or two of the alphabet, should also be so well-achieved is astonishing. There is nothing tentative about the opening books of the Iliad or the Odyssey, no indication that these are ...”

“... were in despair. Returning in the morning she found that Fraser ‘had painted the entire place black – walls, ceiling, all the woodwork, everything was completely black. And so these little light, pale studies, very fragile pieces of paper, shone, and were set off in an amazing way.’ So artists loved the way Fraser ...”

“... on Truman Capote’s account of a quadruple murder in rural Kansas, the film was shot in vérité black and white and used the actual locations where the killings took place. But the true crime genre has a much longer lineage. More than four centuries ago a series of plays closely based on real murder cases appeared on the London stage. Their literary quality ...”

“... in Guitar and Mandolin on a Table? Is not Picasso Nietzsche’s painter? ‘Nude on a Black Armchair’ (1932). Focused on half a dozen paintings from the interwar years, Picasso and Truth is suffused throughout with the sombre glory of Nietzsche’s twilight. Eloquent, confrontational and often disarmingly simple, Clark’s writing moves ...”

“... blood never having figured on the Bennett dining table even in its relatively refined form of black pudding. Some food we did consider too lowly to eat, tripe for instance, which was a favourite of my grandma, and chitterlings from the same ‘uggery-buggery pie shop’ down Tong Road in Wortley.Until I started to read the novels and diaries of the ...”

“... inch a mandarin’ – and the political scientist Colin Leys. Qualified praise goes to Christopher Hill; there are fond memories of Tariq Ali (who contests one or two details in the memoir). Johnson remembers Hodgkin, a dogged adversary of Pretoria, refusing to sign a petition in favour of anti-apartheid activists who’d torn up the cricket ground ...”

“... out the Centre’s orders: The directive sent to Guk contained unintentional passages of deep black comedy which revealed terrifying gaps in the Centre’s understanding of Western society in general and Britain in particular. Guk was told that an ‘important sign’ of British preparations for nuclear war would probably be ‘increased purchases of ...”

“... blacksmith an ideal heroic shadow behind his contemporary successor, a representative of the black economy, ‘unpursued by conscience or by priest’: but the poem’s apparent sense of the involvement of economic with moral collapse is not pursued beyond a kind of soured grumble. And ‘The Garden’ opens with a condemnation of what Tomlinson calls ...”

“... a cricket-playing Protestant stockbroker called Adrien who strikes Ellen as a ‘grown-up Christopher Robin’, and his cousin Bobbie. Life seems idyllic until Ellen catches her flat-mate together with the balding and maladroit Bobbie. Insane with jealousy, Ellen attacks Myra with the bread-knife and kills her, making it look, however, as if the ...”

“... are everything to them. It is gross, but also comically inept: ‘I look in the mirror. Silvered black hair; gray lizardskin shoes’ – it’s a jigsaw of a Whistler speaking, not a person! Once he has put the pieces together, they proclaim: I am, like my mother, a broad-shouldered, slim-waisted woman with strong thighs; neither small-breasted nor ...”