“... no stigma attaches to being a secret fantasy-snob and no one minds being bullied in a book. But Christopher Sykes, who saw much of Waugh in the Army, and who remained a warm friend, had to remark in his biography that ‘to the naturally weak he was as merciless as he had been in his bullying schooldays ... it always utterly disgusted me.’ Nonetheless ...”

“... is not in the popular English vocabulary) live in a separate world in this country. It judges that Christopher Fry has a place in conversation, but not Roger Fry, nor Elizabeth Fry. The spy Fuchs has a substantial entry, but whereas the Macmillan Encyclopedia adds ‘his motives were idealistic,’ Pan considers it wiser to leave out that possibly unpatriotic ...”

“... politics – for survival in the competitive, meritocratic postwar world. These habits included a black-and-white view of reality, moral certainty, and a healthy contempt for birth and breeding. Leavis was thus already a fine, intuitive polemicist and self-advertiser, who hardly needed much help from acolytes like Ford. The aggression built into the ...”

“... he reverts to his disagreement with E.P. Thompson about the Berkshire Blacks and the Waltham Black Act of 1723 which made it illegal for anyone to go disguised into woods. The particular issue between Thompson and Rogers is the bearing of the episode upon Pope. Thompson’s sense of history, as he makes clear in his attack on Althusser in The Poverty of ...”

“... in the last five years towards centralising political power and building up the largest army in black Africa, but it has so far failed to make any real progress toward solving the national and regional problems of post-imperial Ethiopia: yet without this there is no possible way of consolidating the Marxist revolution to which Mengistu claims to remain ...”

“... Bush announced that the Vietnam Syndrome had been kicked after Operation Desert Storm, but as Christopher Hitchens noted here in August, controversy over draft-dodging in the Presidential election campaign indicates that it was merely in remission. The dictionary says a syndrome can be a characteristic combination of opinions or behaviour, but the ...”

“... whereas here the Israelis build on stolen Palestinian land with the aid of the US taxpayer. Warren Christopher has arrived, looking as clueless as ever, to enforce a ceasefire on Israel’s terms. But the French have rightly refused to leave the field. The Americans after all are not honest brokers; they are not even dishonest brokers; they are wholly ...”

“... march on 4 December, a month after the Soviet invasion, hundreds of women and young girls wearing black and carrying flowers gathered at Budapest’s Heroes’ Square. The demonstration was broken up by Russian troops. Reprisals began in December, with the first death sentence against a participant in the revolution. Two leading Budapest freedom ...”

“... a programme openly blamed for having encouraged illegitimacy – and labelled, sotto voce, as a black teenager procreation subsidy – is what is meant by ‘welfare reform’.) Overall, Clinton positions himself just to the right of Dole on every social and ‘moral’ issue, counting on the fact that liberals have no choice but to vote for ...”

“... Green told his interviewer that ‘the writer must be disengaged’, and enjoyed pointing out that Christopher Isherwood, who called Living ‘the best proletarian novel ever written’, had never worked in a factory himself. Pontifex’s own employees, having rumbled the fact that Yorke and Green were the same, weren’t so impressed. ‘I read your ...”

“... to bring attention to the cause. In Oceti Sakowin cosmology the Dakota Access Pipeline was a great Black Snake wreaking destruction – but also uniting Indigenous nations, and sparking an epic battle to protect Grandmother Earth.The Indigenous nations’ protest camps attracted activists from across the continent, who were met with extensive corporate ...”

“... The man awoke to find himself healed, but for the rest of his life, he had one white leg and one black. Not all miracles healed. The saints could also liberate prisoners, bring rain or fair weather, give children to the barren and bring about victory in combat or in court. But when scorned, they wrought ferocious miracles of punishment. Saints not only ...”

“... descriptions, the corrector sounds like some combination of child genius, automaton and loyal dog. Christopher Plantin praised his son-in-law’s potential for correcting because he has never been passionately interested in anything so much as the study of the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac and Arabic tongues (in which those who confer with him ...”

“... periodic justification for acts of conquest, as we can see from the episode of the so-called Black Hole of Calcutta and the demonisation of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula. The British were often portrayed not as aggressors but as victims, and here narratives of captivity (such as those retailed recently by Linda Colley) played a significant role. The central ...”

“... Despite the predominance of coloured Cubans the police are often racist as well, and Luis is very black. The police stopped us several times last year. They detained Luis once for seven hours. In each instance he was with me, or his friend Leo from Montreal. And in any case whose business is it? Things have loosened up in recent years, but everyone knows the ...”