“... There was a lot of racial tension around bebop. Black men were going with fine, rich white bitches. They were all over these niggers out in public and the niggers were clean as a motherfucker and talking all kind of hip shit. Trane liked to ask all these motherfucking questions back then about what he should or shouldn’t play ...”

“... symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to attend the symposium itself but, never one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s ...”

“... muscularity, street smarts and studliness that had found earlier voice in Mailer’s essay ‘The White Negro’ and his novel An American Dream, and in Norman Podhoretz’s stentorian confession ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’. Sure, the liberal arts are swell, but what good is book-learning in a showdown against the mightily hung? In an interesting ...”

“... is factual; the biographical asides surrounding that drunken social outcast, the Australian poet Christopher Brennan (whom J.C. Squire believed to be an invention of David Peterley’s, and who is now recognised as Australia’s first poet of international significance) may be checked against a long manuscript in the Mitchell Library at Sydney – by Richard ...”

“... Two other works throw light on this, and Littell seems to have studied both of them. One is Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 (1992), which revealed that the men of a police unit that systematically shot the Jewish inhabitants of one village after another were not Nazi fanatics or passionate anti-semites. They were ...”

“... the moderation of Isaac Watts and Thomas Hardy as at least as interesting as the wildness of Christopher Smart and W.B. Yeats. I’m not sure how moderate Hardy was – an amiable re-opening of this question was the subject of the postcard from Stanford – but Watts does sound like the unanxious Calvinist, the man who has made his peace with the ...”

“... presaging lunch at Marshall and Snelgrove’s and tea at Fortnum’s’. Instead ‘girls with white faces and heavily kohled eyes hurried out towards Praed Street’ – the book is best read with a streetfinder close to hand – ‘as if hastening to appointments with abortionists in seedy consulting rooms behind the Edgware Road’. Alas, times have ...”

“... occurred when Christian Bourguet described his meeting in late March 1980 with Jimmy Carter at the White House. Bourguet, a French lawyer with ties to the Iranians, acted as an intermediary between the US and Iran; he had come to Washington because, despite an arrangement worked out with the Panamanians to arrest the ex-Shah, the deposed ruler had left ...”

“... that that is what they are. Ideology means Marxism (and especially that ‘erring colleague’, Christopher Hill), but Elton reserves some of his ammunition for the alternative, liberal determinists, Arnold Toynbee, Sir John Plumb, J.H. Hexter, while not forgetting that morally admirable but woefully misled and misleading Christian Socialist ...”

“... trousers and a battered hat with a brim that hid her face’; the visiting Bertrand Russell; Christopher Isherwood; and Huxley’s favourite mystic, Krishnamurti, accompanied by a retinue of Theosophists and vegetarian catering ladies in saris. While his guests looked like pixies ‘on a spree’, according to Loos, Huxley himself resembled a ‘giant ...”

“... The subject is that more limited thing, the Henrician Reformation, which some historians, notably Christopher Haigh, make a matter of politics not religion and detach from the Reformation. Bernard, without any prolegomena, or rather only 124 words, plunges straight into 72 pages on the ‘King’s Great Matter’, the divorce. The implication is ...”

“... a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s sometime collaborator Christopher Middleton edited another in the much missed Cape Editions in 1968. Yet these did not gain Trakl the attention he deserves. It is odd that an English sensibility so well attuned to Sylvia Plath’s intensities never quite managed to rise to Trakl; the ...”

“... image-theft. Once again, despite the day’s walk, I found myself unable to sleep that night. The Christopher is a coaching inn on the Eton side of the river. Behind its olde worlde façade a tarmac lane extends, lined with refurbed hutches full of swags, pelmets and throw cushions – all the luxury stuffing. Boy and dog slept, I pored over the maps worried ...”

“... entreated to play ‘Rule Britannia’. And when, his moralising over, he dusts his fingers on a white napkin after handing back Yorick’s skull to the gravedigger, an inspired prankster yells out: ‘Wai-ter.’ Charles Baudelaire had, it might be argued, a more authentic claim to the inky cloak and cosmic melancholy of the troubled prince than any other ...”

“... a famous shipwreck, ‘wireless ghosts’. One night, he looks out of his window and sees a ‘white figure’ gliding across the lawn: The experience startles him – not least because it plays out in the real and close-up space around the house an aspect of some scenes that he occasionally intuits but never quite pins down when riding the dial’s ...”