“... that not every so-called ‘reimpression’ is an intentional forgery. The celebrated ‘penny black’ of 1864, for instance, was reprinted by the British Government, in a few specimens only, for the benefit of the collections of British princes. Those of you who remain stamp collectors later on will have many encounters with forgeries and will soon know ...”

“... of the crank about him. He resembles Nelson Denoon, with the important difference that Morel is black. (Not that race counts for as much as might be feared in a novel where a white woman cuckolds her husband with a black man: something else that might have surprised Fiedler, who thought racial anxiety had disfigured the ...”

“... In his essay on Nikolai Leskov, Walter Benjamin observes, almost in passing, that the novel inevitably brings about the end or storytelling. Like many of Benjamin’s paradoxes, this insight is very unsettling to the received idea – oh dear no, the novel doesn’t tell a story after all ...”

“... as painting and sculpture were pressured by photography and film, and modernists like Walter Benjamin and László Moholy-Nagy redefined literacy as the ability to read both. For Benjamin, the reproducibility of these media not only shattered the auratic power of the unique work (this was mostly wishful ...”

“... typical Apple Island family traditionally has a turncoat white for a father, a scrawny frau black as coal for a mother, or vice versa, and a litter of tan children their issue’ – which isn’t to mention a cross-dresser and a homicidal rape victim whose son is her brother. The inspectors’ first step, after turning up with callipers, cameras, tape ...”

“... a bit like custard. The corruption of some of the characters isn’t so unsurprising: that of Benjamin Horne, for example, the father of crazy Audrey and the owner of, among other things, Horne’s department store, the Great Northern Hotel, and One-Eyed Jacks, a casino-cum-brothel just over the Canadian border. But then there’s Laura’s other, secret ...”

“... revolt of 1791. In 1801, they were serving under the charismatic, ambitious and independent-minded black governor Toussaint Louverture when Napoleon dispatched a military expedition to reassert full French control over the colony. The French forces, commanded by Napoleon’s brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, had some initial success. They captured ...”

“... from the dark with scythes carried aloft like swords. In Charge, the peasant woman has become Black Anna, the legendary leader of the rebellion; we see her great body from behind as she rouses a crowd of peasants, brandishing blades, pitchforks and sticks, to storm the town of Heilbronn. The horizontality of the image now conveys the onslaught of the ...”

“... singer Madonna Ciccone’, as Smith has it, a tic that runs throughout the book), Walter Benjamin (or ‘the popular wise guy Walter Benjamin’). Each chapter has a cute digest at its head, announcing the delights on offer: ‘Alex-Li Tandem was Jewish – A rainbow over Mountjoy – Hand-print – Superstar ...”

“... of excess and burn-out. Two others are those of the undertaker and the gambler. Baudelaire’s black garb echoes the undertaker’s habit, which in the Salon de 1846 he described as the uniform of his century. The poetry is like the rehearsal of a funeral, an extended act of mourning, though whether for himself or itself is not always clear (at ...”

“... admits to being indebted, the thinking particularly of the Frankfurt School and of Walter Benjamin. America, both the place and the book as he has conceived them, is invented to demonstrate that any theories that have not evolved as Baudrillard’s have done are now, no less than persons and people, an incumbrance. In several previous works, a number ...”

“... Benjamin Labatut​ ’s When We Cease to Understand the World is a skein of non-fiction stories or narrative essays unified by their subject matter, the mostly 20th-century breakthroughs in physics and chemistry that shook both those disciplines and the wider world. (The judges of last year’s International Booker Prize, who shortlisted the book, must have concluded that the fictional element predominates, though it amounts to embroidery in the gaps between facts ...”

“... limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the camera as grimly as Papuan warriors. There was a need to face the facts of war. Percy Hennell made records of reconstructive surgery; in the exhibition you can see a soldier who has had the socket of his lost eye patched over ...”

“... acts ‘as a self-appointed cultural critic’ in a tradition of clowns and jesters, according to Benjamin Radford, while simultaneously ‘plausibly maintaining that it’s all in good fun and shouldn’t be taken (too) seriously’. According to John Lindow’s ‘unnatural history’ of trolls, the original trolls of Scandinavian folklore punished improper ...”

“... it of the sort that were later to feature in the Tale of Two Bad Mice. ‘Sally [a snake] and four black newts escaped overnight,’ Beatrix recorded in her journal. ‘Caught one black newt in school room and another in larder, but nothing seen of poor Sally.’ From an early age she drew compulsively and documented her ...”