“... men are victims of romantic grandiosity; a deliberate literariness infests the book, as it does Eugene Onegin. Characters take their cues from romantic fashions, and from writers like Scott, Pushkin, Byron, Rousseau and Marlinsky (a producer of Caucasian adventures and the most popular Russian novelist of the 1830s). This is how Pechorin is first ...”

“... Signs of disintegration are everywhere in Iraq. Oily columns of black smoke billow up from the airport road where US patrols are regularly hit by suicide bombers or roadside bombs between Baghdad and Camp Victory, the gigantic US headquarters on the edge of the airport. In a vain attempt to deny cover to resistance fighters, American soldiers have chopped down the palm trees and bushes beside the highway, leaving only the stumps behind ...”

“... negative was fixed allowed a precision which, at this point, paper couldn’t match. Yet printing black on silver makes for an image that isn’t only expensive, but also difficult to see – one of many reasons why by the mid-1860s, silver-based negatives (as well as paper ones) had mostly yielded to glass. The brief triumph of the paper negative is a key ...”

“... is killed with his dogs and servants, not by Irishmen resenting his English connections, but by Black and Tans avenging the hanging of an informer from a Quinton oak. Willie’s mother takes to drink and slits her wrists. In the emotion of the moment, Marianne conceives shy Willie’s child, but by the time she knows and has cut herself off from her ...”

“... Female Beauty’: ‘The ladies of Arabia stain their fingers and toes red, their eyebrows black and their lips blue … The Japanese women gild their teeth, and those of the Indies paint them red … Hindoo females, when they wish to appear particularly lovely, smear themselves with a mixture of saffron, turmeric and grease.’ There is a vast ...”

“... to bring off a close imitation of Russian verse in English, but he is referring to Johnston’s Eugene Onegin and remains silent on the tetrameters of Johnston’s Bronze Horseman. Johnston’s new book, Choiseul and Talleyrand, includes two further Pushkin poems, ‘Count Nulin’ and ‘Mozart and Salieri’, both of which are also in Thomas’s ...”

“... ignore British complicity in the making of apartheid South Africa). She begins with a story about Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), and ends with a request, in verse, to those ‘whom I have wronged’, to ‘please/ take me/with you.’ Krog wrote Country of My Skull in Afrikaans and ...”

“... strikingly Sloan – abandoned types altogether. In a modest painting of fishermen on a dock, a black man turns to speak to a man sitting beside him. He is the only black in the line of shabbily clad figures, but the interest is less in ‘the Negro’ than in the tonalities of a city-bred companionship of strangers ...”

“... rumours that she was passing in Harlem. The heroines of her novels are loners, alienated from both Black and white communities, but forced to masquerade as belonging to one or the other. In Quicksand (1928), Helga Crane, the daughter of a white working-class mother and a West Indian father, must pass as Black to enter Harlem ...”

“... gaps, between urban workers and suburban professionals, between rich and poor, between white and black and Latino. By his willingness to change and to transcend the standard political categories, Tye’s Kennedy could have become America’s ‘high priest of reconciliation’. The seventh of the nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, he grew up in an ...”

“... but their power is the greater for that: coming at the end of a description of weather over Black Combe (a recurrent point de repère of the book), they are a formal act of conclusion and interpretation which refuses to interpret. Again and again this is the pattern: the creative energy of the poems is channelled into description, and the wisdom of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... seems as if everyone is trying to become the worst possible version of themselves. Here are Eugene Landy, Charles Manson, Phil Spector, Murry Wilson. Then there are the scarcely believable transformations of the boy-child Brian Wilson. How did he jump through the hula hoops of novelty pop to arrive, in the blink of an ‘I’, at a place where it seemed ...”

“... fortunes and died in a shipwreck. ‘All my childhood,’ she writes, ‘seemed to be under the black shadow of this mysterious father of whom no one would speak, and the terrible word divorce.’ Here was the taproot of her emancipation. ‘I would live to fight against marriage,’ she writes, ‘and for the right for every woman to have a child or ...”

“... perceptions of African American artistic expression. In a little over a decade, more books by black Americans appeared in print than had been published in the entire history of black American writing. In December 1923, Opportunity, the mouthpiece of the National Urban League, declared in its editorial: ‘There are new ...”