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“... Alexander Stephens, observed, ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.’Lincoln did not believe that the federal government had the authority to do anything about slavery in the states in ordinary circumstances. He ...”

“... his assisting in his mother’s school; his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Elinor White; their ten-year stay on a New Hampshire farm given to Frost by his grandfather; the early deaths of two of their six children; the brief two-and-a-half year escape to England, where Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will (reviewed enthusiastically by ...”

“... usually had to be well-born, well-off, talented and – in the European tradition at least – white. But most women philosophers before the late 20th century needed something more: access to a man who held the uncommon view that women – or at least certain women – could be serious thinkers too. The odds were long. For centuries, philosophers hammered ...”

“... or an accident or a coincidence. But what if something rather like that happens again? What if William McRae, a radical Glasgow solicitor, and a prominent objector to the dumping of nuclear waste in the Galloway hills, is found shot dead in his car with the revolver some twenty yards away in a stream? Are we to assume, as the authorities in Scotland ...”

“... and the teller. The presence of the story-taker wards off the question ‘So what?’ According to William Labov, a story-taker from a tradition quite different from the one George Ewart Evans represents, a sociolinguist rather than a folklorist, that is the response that every good narrator is continually evading: ‘when the narrative is over, it should be ...”

“... here are children; sometimes they have been seen by children, too, as in the case of a certain William, who was sent away from his home in Apt after a series of violent incidents and died in 1211 after a brawl. On several nights not long after his death, he appeared, naked except for some rags, to his 11-year-old girl cousin, who had been very fond of ...”

“... most satisfactory in the book. Period detail – Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Palladian, blue and white striped dresses, ‘pancake’ make-up – is more abundant here than elsewhere. The point about one woman in her time playing many parts – university wife in an English provincial town, South African political detainee – is well thought out. When it ...”

“... pennies for a five-dollar bill.’ Having counted out the pennies, and taken along an anthology of William James for company, Baker was forced to wait at the counter as the manager counted out every penny, ‘while dozens of well-off, exhausted East Siders curled their lips at my somewhat pathetic miserliness’: I reeled to the violently yellow ...”

“... compete by dancing on ropes. In the published text, he changed the colours to purple, yellow and white; blue, red and green were the colours, respectively, of the Orders of the Garter, Bath and Thistle – coveted prizes in Robert Walpole’s repertoire of patronage and sleaze.This didn’t deter the hack who blustered that Swift’s intention ‘could be no ...”

“... the anecdotes I will include here provide some context for the subsequent doings of Lieutenant William Calley and his comrades. Adviser Mike Sutton one day landed in a Huey helicopter in a Delta hamlet where a limp figure was hanging from ropes lashed to a tree – the village chief, disembowelled during the night by Vietcong guerrillas. His wife had been ...”

“... of intimacy in the imperial ‘contact zone’ undermines the binaries – metropole and colony, white and black, master and slave – on which imperialism depends and is a strategy of post and decolonial thinking. Yet, as Carby knows, the production of the past remains tied to the contingencies of the present, and is limited by them (her description of ...”

“... herd instinct. The first zombie movie is generally reckoned to be Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), in which Bela Lugosi plays a mill owner in Haiti who uses voodoo to control his black zombie workers, and to enslave a young white American woman who’s engaged to one of his neighbours. As Kyle ...”

“... inadequate education and the ever present threat of violence (a comprehensive system of white supremacy known by the shorthand Jim Crow), they found employment on the bottom rungs of the burgeoning industrial economy. Despite pervasive prejudice in the North, the migrants spoke of a second emancipation, of crossing the Jordan into the Promised ...”

“... Slotkin writes, rested primarily on racism, which he describes as ‘the division of Black and white, slave and free, into different orders of humanity’. What did this mean for the Myth of the Founding, which, as an aspiration if not in practice, took as its basic premise Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence, ‘All men are created ...”

“... a degree of consciousness and concentration which the very best stories don’t seem to have. William Gass rationally observed that the story ‘is a poem grafted onto a sturdier stock’ but Borges decreed that ‘unlike the novel, it may be essential.’ That has an ominous sound. None of these suggestions seems to fit the way in which V.S. Pritchett ...”