“... press, Parliament and public for the first time since emancipation. Eyre’s critics were led by John Stuart Mill, his supporters by the likes of Carlyle and Ruskin. But the issue for Mill and liberal opinion was the legality of the punitive actions, not the source of the protest, which was the social, political and economic oppression of the majority black ...”

“... has lasted ever since. But in his warm evocation of this boyhood, the kind you might imagine a John Buchan hero to have had, there is also (and not for the last time) a utilitarian chill. Aged 13, he allows himself to be seduced by the household’s part-time maid, aged 16, whom he finds in his bedroom in an inviting posture. Never one to waste an ...”

“... A fondly remembered place of white raspberries, fountains and rounds of halma played with Nanny Hawkins, the country house can hardly be expected to survive in a modern world where, even before the Army came along and turned its landscaped valley into an assault course, one traditional building after another was being razed to make way for ‘blocks of ...”

“... the Sierra Madre, and a friendly profile of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s ...”

“... mainly of blacks (including Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins and Cab Calloway). Unlike his friend Léger, who merely adapted ethnological textbook drawings for his ‘primitive’ stage designs, Brancusi had finally internalised it all, had become an African, if you will, at the age of 62 – a tribe of one, free ...”