“... own inferior condition,’ Bethencourt writes, ‘but they did not question the status of the Black people they were transporting and selling into forced labour.’ By the 18th century, New Christian merchants no longer dominated Iberian and Spanish American trade. In part this was the outcome of decisions that backfired, such as their support for the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... whom she has given shelter; she is realistic about his promises of ‘herons crying out over the black lakes’ and ‘the grouse, and the owls with them, and the larks and the big thrushes where the days are warm’, but concludes that for all the cold nights, ‘you’ve got a fine bit of talk stranger, and it’s with yourself I’ll go.’ Unlike her ...”

“... his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight, Arnold Wesker and his wife Dusty. Naomi Mitchison. Ted Hughes, Christopher Logue (whose recording of poetry and jazz, Red Bird, I’d bought with my pocket money at St Christopher’s), Lindsay Anderson, Fenella Fielding. A Portuguese couple, described to me as ‘a poet in exile and his ...”

“... and not the real deal. Culture of Complaint may prove to be the most influential such screed since Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Hughes is much funnier than Lasch, and probably happier – his strings of metaphor are evidence that the author enjoys his work. Nimble yet lunkish, his sense of humour favours sarcasm and the well-turned ...”

“... for many years she was. Mandelstam’s most moving poems about the ruin of Petersburg ‘in the black velvet of Soviet night’ (the reference is to the velvet which draped the scaffold at an important execution) are marvellous and mature reveries on the theme of ‘so one and so my own’, on friendship, women, the individual and the blest poetic word. We ...”

“... to the unconverted, a more specialised activity, goes by a different name: missionary work. Christopher Isherwood harboured a certain amount of rancour towards the majority, but disciplined himself for the missionary purposes of A Single Man, where his mouthpiece George is in mourning for a dead lover, and so benefits from the status of honorary ...”

“... applies a similar fertiliser. Speaking of his earliest, English, wife, he says: ‘Jocelyn wore black, but blackness was what she feared. I dealt with more bilious colours – the browns, the greens.’ Bile, blood, bilge, mulch: these are the effluvia Amis deals in. There is something schoolboyishly English about Amis’s continuing interest in vomit and ...”

“... If the new bunch have a distinguishing trait, it is born-again brazenness. In an analysis of Christopher Hitchens and his historic predecessor in the craft, George Orwell, in the LRB (23 January 2003), Stefan Collini coined a superb descriptive phrase: what the reborns stand for is ‘the "no-bullshit” bullshit’ of anti-liberalism, re-equipped with ...”

“... the masses had only been waiting for a signal to pour into the streets and head for the palaces. Christopher Clark uses a metaphor from nuclear physics for the way the revolution accelerated: From the beginning of March 1848, it becomes impossible to trace the revolutions as a linear sequence from one theatre of turbulence to the next. We enter the fission ...”

“... defence and science correspondent, Chapman Pincher. Out of the Express’s triumvirate of black-glass offices in London, Manchester and Glasgow came a torrent of newsprint that set the popular tone for the last days of imperial Britain, the ‘second Elizabethan age’ that was half-thrilled and half-terrified by Britain’s endeavours to build its ...”

“... of elegies for the dead interspersed with similes, and pares away almost all narrative elements. Christopher Logue’s dazzling paraphrases adopt a fragmentary form which appears to have been broken apart by the violence it represents, which is often grotesque (‘His neck was cut clean through/Except for a skein of flesh off which/His head hung down like a ...”