“... sort of like going to Central Park’.I thought of Joe when I read about Christian Cooper, the black birdwatcher who crossed paths with a white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nine minutes. There are ‘white spaces’ in Central ...”

“... snow in Gorky Park, Moscow and the sables let loose in the snow on Staten Island at the end – ‘black on white, black on white, and then gone’ – there are connections of cause and effect such as few crime novels have ever had to cope with. Gorky Park is a long novel because it tries to deal as fully with Moscow as ...”

“... tepid, stanked saltwater smells. The willows shimmy in the wind. Where else, As slugs crawl up, black gland on glistening gland, The moon-sharp hedge, could such a dumping ground, So gloom-engorged a cemetery be found? O strange girl-shadow, green and delicate, Pale green, a mouldering of the atmosphere, For what wan purpose are you wandered here, Who are ...”

“... In front of it at the Whitechapel is a circular glass case/ conference table, surrounded by black leather chairs. Among the archive material displayed is a picture of Clement Attlee speaking with Guernica behind him – the display of the picture in 1939 was organised in collaboration with the Stepney Trade Union Council. In the gallery alongside a new ...”

“... the valley below the station, is one of the best and most original of all Victorian churches. St Michael and All Angels is almost as impressive. It has a complicated building history: Bodley was responsible for the first church of 1858, Burges designed the additions which were completed by 1893. Its high, black and red ...”

“... as an MP he would have been a disaster. His vision of human nature is utterly two-dimensional and black-and-white, and his political opinions are dogmatically prescriptive – with an arrogance that only the wholly immature or innocent ever dare show. His world is full of goodies and baddies. The goodies spend all their time in the ‘forefront of community ...”

“... savage gueulade he told the Goncourt brothers he felt he was going to spit blood. But why then, Michael Fried asks, is Madame Bovary positively teeming with assonances, alliterations and repetitions? How is it that after the acid bath of the gueuloir the novel is ‘shot through with precisely the sorts of phonemic effects Flaubert claimed he wished to ...”

“... succession of events that fed into one another until the final collapse. In When Life Nearly Died, Michael Benton, a palaeontologist, describes the decades of research that led to the current consensus about what happened, and argues against an extraterrestrial cause for the catastrophe. It is astonishing that scientists have acknowledged the existence of this ...”

“... beyond the limits of permissible displeasure. And so, in his own way, does the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. Funny Games (1997) is a violent melodrama about a respectable family set upon by nasty criminals, much as in The Desperate Hours (1955) or Cape Fear (1962). (Both films were remade in the 1990s, by ...”

“... sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation. ‘Every man in the street, white, black, red or yellow,’ the statesman Ralph Bunche wrote in 1940, ‘knows that this is “the land of the free” … [and] the cradle of liberty.’ Cowie’s account builds on Tyler E. Stovall’s recent book White Freedom, which argued that the ...”

“... Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel,* which Michael McKeon energetically bids to transcend, gave us, whatever else, the clear image and serviceable concept: ‘formal realism’, the growth of ‘the middle class’, secularised Protestant Man proudly bearing the standard of an aggressive ‘individualism’ – on Crusoe’s hard-won island as in the socioeconomic landscape of contemporary England ...”

“... of the man who had harried and harassed her husband and snubbed her. The Spearses had a son, Michael, a permanent invalid, and, at this time, an undergraduate at Oxford. At Christmas 1939, his plans having gone wrong, de Gaulle was welcomed at the Spears home in Berkshire. He and Michael Spears had a long talk, just ...”

“... in the form of an objective, linear chronicle, cannot turn these omissions to narrative advantage. Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying has been a successful amateur boxer and a waist-gunner in B-17s during the bombing of Germany. Later on he writes what is said to be one of the finest contemporary American poems, ‘Coming Clean’, and later still he ...”

“... bald cone, and soils the windows. A plangently beautiful, one-off version of Annensky called ‘Black Spring’ merits quoting in full, but I will give just five lines of it: Now the dumb, black springtime must look into the chilly eye . . . from under the mould on the roof-shingles, the liquid oatmeal of the roads, the ...”

“... saying it would do about Murdoch. Apropos the price war, I know someone who sat next to Conrad Black at dinner while it was going on. The Telegraph was one of the price war’s principal targets. (‘Don’t worry about the Telegraph,’ Murdoch told Sir David English of Associated Newspapers in 1993. ‘Leave them to me. I’ll put them out of business ...”