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“... him feel most at ease. ‘It was a relief,’ he later wrote, ‘to live in among a great gang of black and brown humanity.’ His first visit to the city, in 1924, lasted only a few days, but it left a lasting impression and he was back two years later. He had already made friends in the city’s bars and cafés, and before long he was doing occasional ...”

“... Lovers of the films of Max Ophuls always return to La Ronde (1950). Its intricate, revolving story, visually represented by a highly stylised carousel, is certainly gracefully told. Each character in the film moves on from one partner to another, prostitute to soldier to servant to rich young man to erring wife to worldly husband to midinette to writer to actress to foppish aristocrat and back to the prostitute, and the narrative seems full of wisdom about the shallows of the human heart ...”

“... to the south of Crete. Everything to the north was European and White; everything to the south was Black or Semitic. Since the first millennium BC everything that had ever come out of Egypt or Palestine or Arabia was utterly contemptible. That was what we learned on weekdays: on Sundays Palestine became the Holy Land and St Paul’s misadventures in Asia Minor ...”

“... parapsychology. All this gives him an opportunity to exercise his underexploited gift for Jewish black humour. In a technically brilliant, very short story, Max Greitzer goes to the funeral of a former mistress. At the funeral parlour he is taken to see her lying in her coffin, ‘all fixed up’ by the mortician. A woman ...”

“... down to bend the body’s bones; the hours; the work; the years. (‘The Cost of Living’) Max Malamud (born Mendel) and his wife, Bertha (Brucha), had been part of the exodus of late 19th-century Russian Jews who fled the Pale for the United States. Although Bernard Malamud is sometimes likened to a literary Chagall, there is nothing schmaltzy about ...”

“... of Revelation, a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes summons the Four Horsemen, the sun turns black, the moon turns red, stars fall out of the sky, and an angel sets free a legion of horse-sized locusts with men’s faces, women’s hair and lion’s teeth, who torture the unsaved for five months. Then 200,000 horsemen appear wearing armour made of ...”

“... Moore’s new novel, her fourth, Finn is a high-school history teacher living in Illinois, and Max is lying in a bed in the Bronx not quite sure where he is, though he knows he’s on the way out. Finn has been trying to figure out what on earth he’s going to say. Maybe he could tell ‘anecdotes that were amusing’ – but not too amusing, because it ...”

“... largely in ethnographic literature, nor in accounts of African art, though their highly polished black wooden masks are found in many collections. Radiance of the Waters, in fact, is only the second book to be written about them (the other is by Kenneth Little, an anthropologist whose The Mende of Sierra Leone first appeared in 1951). Why this comparative ...”

“... At one point, the Mossgrave Partnership attempts to create a sympathetic character, an old black clergyman trying to bring peace to the streets. He reads a text from his Bible and says this: ‘That’s the kind of passage that white Southern fundamentalists, the ones who made out segregation was God’s law and that it was right to kill your ...”

“... at the boundary of the human in general. She had a friend who reserved the greatest hatred for Max Brod – he should never have published his papers, the world should have been a closed eye against Kafka, after all he was his friend. No, she couldn’t quite get there. She preferred a world that was stark and staring, that looked unforgivably into the ...”

“... 1930s. She was taken in, kind of adopted, by ‘the (Aldous) Huxleys’. She chauffeured a large black poodle across America for the (Thomas) Manns; she drank cocktails in Paris with Jane Bowles and Martha Gellhorn; in Grasse and California she cooked and ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David ...”

“... sharing a Paris hotel room with a small, grinning Canadian millionaire. This ‘deformity’ was Max Aitken, still only forty but already – despite the private objections of George V – sitting in the Upper House as Lord Beaverbrook and considered indispensable by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The First World War had established him as a ‘press ...”

“... in paint. The two figures are the same person: Jason, Cooke’s son. One Jason, dressed in black, reads a book; the other lies curled up at the opposite end, staring blankly ahead. Pots of flowers in purple, blue and white float in front of them, not quite touching the dark wooden floor or the pile of books and magazines. The room has an air of ...”

“... long-forgotten joke. He has said that these images are meant as a riposte to the ‘mugshots’ of Black people that circulate in the media.‘Schrödinger’s Black’ satirises the television coverage of the London riots in 2011. ‘What are you looting for? asked the evening news.’ The protests that followed the fatal ...”

“... was becoming more and more a bleak and burdensome formality. Emma, alone much of the time at Max Gate, a house that she disliked, had grown fat and peculiar; she had come to disapprove of her husband’s literary career, and she was no longer eager to share the social life that went with it. This clearly suited Hardy, who spent as much time as he could ...”