“... years ago J.M. Wallace-Hadrill’s classic textbook on barbarian Europe warned against the ‘black untruth’ of claiming a fundamental opposition between kings and their aristocracy. On Charlemagne’s grandson Dr McKitterick writes: ‘Whereas the lay aristocracy was divided in its loyalty to Charles the Bald, the bishops and the church backed him ...”

“... was – and what sort of artist produced it – was considerably less clear-cut (less black and white) than the graphics it used. Perhaps the most instructive attempt to set out shared principles was drawn up in 1969 by the American artist Sol LeWitt. As befits the idiom current at that moment, the artist’s chosen format was a list of 35 ...”

“... If an employer​ has a policy or practice of never promoting black or female or Muslim employees, it doesn’t require much legal theory to recognise this as direct racial or sexual or religious discrimination. Nor does it require a great deal of sophistication to recognise that an employer who makes promotion dependent on a test – literacy perhaps – which is applied to all candidates but which a substantially higher proportion of native-born than immigrant employees can pass is indirectly discriminating against the latter ...”

“... him a sizable audience. The Nightfisherman, a selection of Graham’s letters by his friends Michael and Margaret Snow, with 19 poems, photographs, drawings and his essay ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’, is the most useful and revealing book on the poet yet published and sets out the clearest record of his life. Graham was born into a blue-collar ...”

“... together, ‘peeling off the kilometres to the tune of “Blue Skies”, sizzling down the long black liquid reaches of National Sept, the plane trees going sha-sha-sha through the open windows’. The writing is genuinely alive with what Connolly called ‘erotic nostalgia’. Both Powell and Michael Shelden emphasise ...”

“... career. Since his retirement from the Civil Service, publications have come more frequently. Michael Schmidt, his colleague on PN Review, has promoted his work; and Donald Davie, in one of those hot flushes that make his criticism so unpredictable and exciting, has declared Sisson’s ‘The Usk’ to be ‘one of the great poems of our ...”

“... I noticed that no one else was celebrating. I had scored the most egregious of own goals. You’re Black, you’re a Jehovah’s Witness, you can’t play football. Your life is over. Between the summers of 1998 and 2001 – between leaving school and eventually, after resitting my A levels, going to university – I worked at McDonald’s in Coseley, near ...”

“... the blood of all his descendants with mysterious properties, so that in 1883 William George Black recorded that Dubliners regarded Keogh blood as a proven remedy for the toothache, while an acquaintance claimed to know of a Belfast Keogh ‘whose flesh had actually been punctured scores of times to procure his blood’. ...”

“... to have an effect on the reader. In the McCourt house, people’s teeth turned ‘brown and black in their heads’. Dolores’s friends haven’t got teeth at all, ‘just a row of brown stubs, like iron filings, top and bottom’. White Teeth, Zadie Smith’s polished, attractive fictional debut (LRB, 21 September) didn’t make the shortlist; it ...”

“... has the ‘Kremlin complexion’ from never leaving his office; his teeth are ‘black and irregular, turned inward’; ‘not even his moustache was thick or firm.’ But the magnetism remains. The Spanish Republicans had to pay gold bullion for Soviet weapons, but Stalin laughs off the idea of the Yugoslavs paying back any loans: ‘You are ...”

“... its Free Statehood: on 2 December 1921 he crossed the Irish Sea from Holyhead on the Cambria – Michael Collins and Erskine Childers, on their way back from the Treaty negotiations in London, were making the same journey. The Cambria collided with a schooner (killing three men) and when Ford arrived in Galway he discovered his ancestral home was in ...”

“... am not heart-broken. I have attended several opening ceremonies. On the flight, my brother-in-law, Michael Slater (Michael Pasternak, according to his ticket) is unable to read because the Aeroflot jumbo doesn’t have individual seat lights. He has the aisle seat – exiled to inner darkness. Speaking of darkness, what a ...”

“... prepared with a burnt umber ground. The painter first attacked it, as far as I can see, with a black-loaded brush, dragging a jagged stuttery line almost from top to bottom. That was to be the rock edge of Etna’s crater. Where the volcanic glow was to fall, Rosa slapped on a queasy mid-tone mix of sienna and smalt blue; capped it with brisk blurts of ...”

“... piece of memoir Smith wrote for the New Yorker about Christine, the other ‘female viola-playing black nerd’ in the Brent Youth Orchestra, she describes her friend as ‘one of the many people to whom I am always surreptitiously apologising for my obscene luck. Why do I have money when so many of my friends and family – all of whom work harder than I ...”

“... How does​ Shakespeare look, after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? Scenes of sexual coercion, from Richard III to Pericles, have become more immediate. In Measure for Measure, Isabella’s predicament – should she agree to sleep with Angelo, corrupt deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in order to save her brother from execution? – gets audiences on her side ...”