“... once. I caught one use of ‘silky’ – another word which, in a football context, means ‘black’ – but no ‘naive’, until last night. We came so close.30 June. There was something particularly disappointing about the brawl at the end of the Germany v. Argentina game. I’m not talking about the girly flailing that passed for a fight – a ...”

“... of Athenodorus and Athenodotus. Achilles-names, including Achillodorus, are popular in the Black Sea region, where the hero had important cults. Generally speaking, god-names were less common than you might expect for women – because a baby girl was not considered the answer to a prayer? – and more common than you might expect for slaves, the ...”

“... world of Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, Levellers and millenarian preachers which E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill describe in their work. For Thompson, Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the two ‘founding texts of the English working-class movement’ (the other is The Rights of Man). And so to admire Bunyan is by definition to be a dissenting radical, a ...”

“... TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from ...”

“... publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But in this too, oddly enough, one can fail to find Larkin: because the desire to make tribute tends to move the stress towards the more public, more social ...”

“... as ‘going home’. It seemed so easy when music did it: who wouldn’t want to swat away those black accidentals and come back to sunny C major? These satisfying resolutions are sometimes called ‘perfect cadences’; there is a lovely subspecies called the ‘English cadence’, used often by composers like Tallis and Byrd, in which, just before the ...”

“... Men just when their situation threatens to become dramatically interesting. Similar fates await black characters. As the decade wears on Sterling Cooper begins to recruit black secretaries. Eventually one of them, Dawn, is appointed to the agency’s reception desk. The elderly founder, Bert Cooper, won’t stand for ...”

“... in it and sent it east, in the hope of helping Russia by taking Constantinople and opening up the Black Sea. In the weeks after Brooke’s death landings were finally made on the Gallipoli peninsula and many of his battalion were gunned down by Turks positioned on the high ground; 11 of its 15 officers were lost by the end of June.Brooke was buried a few ...”

“... 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 editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz and his wife, the writer and editor Midge Decter, one ...”

“... to publish all his books – the novel, the essays, the play – simply print ‘Canetti’ in big black letters on top of the jacket, as it might be ‘Socrates’ or ‘Confucius’, and the full name and title in smaller print below. A critic writes of his memoir The Tongue Set Free that ‘all readers – even those not yet exposed to the writings of Elias ...”

“... performed in it; and the minor hall beside it, which can stage chamber operas, is painted close to black inside and needs only a glitter ball to suggest a suburban disco. How come? The exterior of the building was designed by one architect, the Danish master Jørn Utzon; the inside by a confused committee, or, as the Australian critic Philip Drew sourly calls ...”

“... the White Goose and the Mad March Hare’, if that tells you anything. Its conclusion – that Christopher Robin WILL kill himself and erotic potters WILL make obscene vases of their daughters, and everyone else will be swept away by the Great War – is stated so plainly by history that it is not particularly rewarding to work towards in fiction. (‘It ...”

“... was generally not acceptable. ‘The valuation of the liberal individual in India,’ the late Christopher Bayly wrote in Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (2012), was ‘impregnated with the idea of sharing, generosity and compassion … dramatised by tropes from the Indian classics, the Vedanta and particularly the ...”

“... his lap. Although de Pury modestly concedes that it would be an exaggeration to compare him to Christopher Columbus, he does want us to believe that he is a great explorer. He claims to have spotted Richter when he was still an ‘emerging’ artist. He hasn’t the slightest doubt that ‘contemporary art’ is ‘the New Old Masters’. When, in ...”

“... name and blood’. The same could not be said of the Cato Street plotters. William Davidson was a Black cabinet-maker of considerable eloquence (as his speech from the dock showed), who had been born in Jamaica and run away to sea, and later once repaired furniture for Lord Harrowby. Four of the others were ex-soldiers who were more or less starving and had ...”