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“... mother until the war ended in 1945. ‘My grandmother … was an old woman, squat, fierce and black-clad like the granny in the Giles cartoons in the Sunday Express,’ Carter wrote in an essay published in 1976. ‘I think I became the child she had been, in a sense, for the first five years of my life … tough, arrogant and pragmatic.’ Carter never ...”

“... to publish. ‘My book problems are complicated and I would like to ask your advice,’ he told Christopher Ricks. ‘My new book is a small one, some eighty poems … the story of changing marriages, not a malice or sensation, far from it, but necessarily, according to my peculiar talent, very personal. Lizzie is naturally very much against it. I am ...”

“... and nowhere else. This is called ‘non-referential’ – I think nonsensically. The genealogy of black dogs from which the book takes its title and which is reiterated throughout – Pawel ... had brought Perkun with him from Lithuania and on request exhibited a kind of pedigree, which made it clear to whom it may concern that Perkun’s grandmother on her ...”

“... blue, its spine adorned with the familiar gilt coat of arms; the Middleton is clad in unornamented black, suggesting a sly homage to the author’s early prose satire The Black Book, with its sardonic farewell to the reader: ‘Now sir, what is your censure now? You have read me, I am sure. Am I ...”

“... which ‘can easily become the condescending heartlessness which so attenuates [his] fiction’ (Christopher Ricks); who is ‘rich in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’ (D.J. Enright). We may sneakily feel it appropriate that Nabokov the mandarin spent the last two decades of his life in a hotel suite in Montreux – after ...”

“... frog,’ says Heathcote, who is now wading, and grinning in enjoyment at the mud which rises in black circles about his knees. ‘Very common round here, so I’m told.’ Of course, the animal is not a tree frog. Heathcote’s imagination is already providing him with a bestiary for this improbable tropic. It’s a lizard – and I see several more, on the ...”

“... stamped with power, not with poets, the Thames and the Neva rustling like banknotes, then, black on gold, the Hudson’s silhouettes? From frozen Neva to the Hudson pours, under the airport domes, the echoing stations, the tributary of emigrants whom exile has made as classless as the common cold, citizens of a language that is now yours, and every ...”

“... sound like such an ordinary, affirmative, innocuous sort of affair that one wonders why Christopher Ricks and Denis Donoghue do not instantly rush to embrace it. At other times, and for other audiences, it becomes a far more menacing, subversive matter: nothing less than a radicalised form of Marxism, a claim which must come as a mighty surprise to ...”

“... and volunteers ready to work for this were dwindling – in Edinburgh on one occasion a ‘Black Circular’ had to be sent round to remind defaulters (I was one) of their duty. As a concession, a commission was set up to study whether the Party Constitution was in need of change. Discussion of this in Edinburgh was in a mild key, largely because our ...”

“... maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an earlier full-scale Life was published in 2006) tell much the same story. If we look further back, we find Herbert Butterfield in George III and the Historians (1957) telling ...”

“... statesmen, like others, did not know what they were doing.’ Something similar is argued by Christopher Clark in The Sleepwalkers, a book whose title says it all. I don’t think this is just an academic spat, a Historikerstreit, with little application to modern political debate. On the contrary, I think it has had a damaging knock-on effect on our ...”

“... across the pages of Peyton’s book like thistledown. But the cancellations of Blue Streak and Black Arrow, Britain’s own attempts at space launchers, along with the TSR2 – an RAF tactical strike reconnaissance aircraft designed to carry nuclear bombs to a European battlefield – were weighty enough steps at the time. Zuckerman went to see the TSR2 ...”

“... almost a thousand scientists had detected evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The observation required astonishing technical precision: the 4 km-long arms of each of the two branches of Ligo, three thousand miles ...”

“... of an intellectual aristocracy Waugh thought pompous and pointless. His was the sceptical black comedy of the columnist, which she considered reckless and damaging. She exempted him, however, from her principal objection to his set: This coterie has led the spirit of anti-Europeanism that pervades Tory Party and country. ...”

“... further than most in making sense of the society emerging from the ruins. This was no easy task. Christopher Clark’s recent history of 1848, Revolutionary Spring, shows that most Europeans experienced the preceding decades as a time of ‘flux and transition’. In France, a number of different political futures seemed possible. Some of these were ...”