“... exhibitions, even a big-budget film, Amazing Grace, that made an unlikely matinee idol of William Wilberforce. All these events took place in an atmosphere suffused with self-congratulation. The crusade against the trade and the government’s eventual response offers a usable past for a society increasingly aware of its multiracial character: a ...”

“... feelings of hope and opportunity for Sansom, feelings which he associates with his baby. He quotes William Trevor – ‘The map of Ireland is not unlike a sleeping infant’ – as he compares his newborn’s tidy proportions with the ‘faltering outline’ of his own body: ‘I am coming to resemble the shape of mainland Britain.’ But there are other ...”

“... was wearing what he thought of as her Jean Seberg outfit: black pedal-pushers, black and white striped matelot top, a short red silk scarf knotted at her throat.’ ‘Louise was wearing knee-high black leather boots and a tweed cape over a heavy Arran sweater.’ ‘She was wearing a little green coat tightly belted at the waist and her spun-sugar ...”

“... lived with her as his wife. By the time Lady Gregory told James these stories, her husband, Sir William Gregory, had been dead two years. Six weeks before his death, their friend, the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, whom the Gregorys had first met in Egypt in 1881, a year after their marriage, published in a new volume of poetry a group of what he called ‘A ...”

“... to leave the younger members of the team to make the running in a debate which was to lead to the White Paper on ‘Employment Policy’ of May 1944 – the one Mrs Thatcher used to carry about in her handbag. The Section’s opening paper focused on the counter-cyclical management of total demand, with the clear implication that in depressions the Budget ...”

“... who are just beginning life can be seen to be much more grown-up. All the infirmities of age – white whine swilling, importunate bladders, evenings beginning after breakfast – thrust us firmly back into the needs and the atmosphere of being young together. And so Alun (at school it was plain Alan) Weaver and his wife Rhiannon come back to South Wales ...”

“... do believe is that because a few people can and do go from rags to riches or from log cabin to White House, it is somehow as if everybody else could too. To remind them that they haven’t and don’t and never conceivably could is to miss the point. It is because they would genuinely like to believe what they know to be untrue that Americans do in fact ...”

“... too politically self-conscious – the map at the back of Absalom, Absalom is clearly marked: ‘William Faulkner, Sole Owner and Proprietor’. But if a writer is not in some strong sense a coloniser, he risks being only a better informed, more alert tourist, and Rush’s Botswana has increasingly become an exotic stage set rather than a distinctive place ...”

“... described by Walt Whitman, with the cry of ‘Murder!’ ringing through the playhouse, the white-faced widow shouting in her box, the silly-looking theatregoers rushing on stage: ‘a dense and motley crowd, like some horrible carnival – the actors and actresses all there in their play-costumes and painted faces, with mortal fright showing through ...”

“... his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal ...”

“... Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright. (The children of enslaved women inherited their mothers’ status and were born enslaved.) Long had made enough money from his cane fields and enslaved labour to return ...”

“... Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest work, but just at the point at which he began to win recognition, he appeared to give up writing. Though he continued to publish in little magazines throughout the ...”

“... and Bliss, a boy of mysterious parentage raised in the black church, who has fled North, passed as white, and become Adam Sunraider, the racist New England Senator. As Callahan has put it together, the novel begins with the failed effort of Hickman and his flock to warn Sunraider that a young black man is out to assassinate him. Organised as a set of ...”

“... Smith to walking on his eyeballs. It not only created fiery anguish in the big toe but caused a white precipitation at the knuckles. Horace Walpole wrote of ‘chalky rills running from the fingers’ and ‘a hail of chalkstones and liquid chalk’, as if from a burst pipe. The authors have spotted in a Sherlock Holmes story an old man ‘cram full of ...”

“... romances as a parfit gentil knight, by Renaissance painters as a grandiose operatic soprano, by William Woodthorpe Tarn as an English gentleman. More recently, he has offered a banquet to fashionable reductionists, who know by instinct that anyone widely admired and honoured must be rotten at the core, and has been presented as a kind of catch-all fascist ...”