“... 1923. It’s like Isherwood’s retrospective marvelling, as he sets off to America at the end of Christopher and His Kind, at the unknown future and the unknown life partner who await him: ‘He will be near you for many years without your meeting. But it would be no good if you did meet him now. At present, he is only four years old.’ Forster seems never ...”

“... Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a ‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really struck me was that every woman I knew who had seen it was mesmerised not by the ‘issues’ but by Huppert, and not just for her acting – she’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to yesterday’s art student – via, for instance, the neolithic White Horse at Uffington, the black horses on Greek vases and the blue horses of Franz Marc. But the transitions between then and now supplied by those tales of material change are so radical that they point us back to one central assumption about our species. Our brain is also a mind: an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and has been appropriated by all kinds: sophisticated literary critics such as Aidan Day and Christopher Ricks, slob biographers such as Bob Spitz, genuine crazies like A. J. Weberman, who, as founder of the Dylan Liberation front, used to conduct seminars to his groupies on the Dylan family’s garbage; fervent hagiographers like Paul ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”