“... New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2019) both feature in Harris’s bibliography. But since ...”

“... his years. Memoirists of his schooldays speak of him as having been almost spookily unboyish. Even Christopher Isherwood, who later on would enjoy noting his friend’s ‘stumpy, immature fingers’ and ‘babyishly shapeless’ ankles, found it hard to view him with full-hearted condescension: ‘I remember him chiefly for ... his smirking, tantalising air ...”

“... their bodies occupied.* They defend McQueen against charges of cruelty, misogyny and racism: the black model Debra Shaw appeared manacled and hobbled, the dancer Shalom Harlow was pelted by paint-spraying robots, models paraded on a constantly tilting floor in a re-enactment of a dance marathon, as in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Their descriptions evoke ...”

“... to the ‘vociferous atheists of recent decades’. He is appalled in particular by something Christopher Hitchens wrote: that Huxley ‘cleaned Wilberforce’s clock, ate his lunch, used him as a mop for the floor, and all that’. He points out (‘pace Hitchens’) that contemporary reports suggest Wilberforce wasn’t at all put out. The passage is ...”

“... 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 ...”