“... a photo of it is included in the exhibition, taken at the insistence of Fenton’s chief assistant Marcus Sparling, ‘as there was a possibility of a stop being put … to the further travels of both the vehicle and its driver’. It is a heroic image, in its way: Sparling, in the driver’s seat, seems half-proud of the absurdity of his situation. The van ...”

“... dispel our misgivings. She begins in autumn 192 AD, when the emperor Commodus, megalomaniac son of Marcus Aurelius, is beginning seriously to lose it. He has subjected the people and senate of Rome to two weeks of compulsory entertainment, mostly involving the slaughter of a great number of animals in the Colosseum. At one point in this Blutfest, we are told ...”

“... complacent Dr Ragin in ‘Ward 6’, who lectures his abused patients at the local asylum about Marcus Aurelius and the importance of stoicism, and in the fatuous priest in ‘In the Ravine’ who, at dinner, comforts a woman who has lost her baby while pointing at her with ‘a fork with a pickled mushroom on the end of it’. Yet the son did not abandon ...”

“... After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received ...”

“... That Hoover persecuted Martin Luther King is notorious, but Hoover was also the man who drove Marcus Garvey out of America. Similarly, the Hoover who turned his malign attention upon the anti-Vietnam War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in ...”

“... couched in consciously classical terms: the outstanding example here is the Rainbow Portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. But there was no suppression or destruction of images that Elizabeth or her council found offensive. Isaac Oliver’s miniature of the queen at 59, for example, is compellingly realistic. It was not suppressed, nor were the prints ...”

“... that Manley omits to mention. For despite the ethnic tones of the local clubs, of which C.L.R. James has left us such a fascinating record, West Indian teams were by definition multiracial from the beginning. Whites may have been expected to lead, but white and black players played as equals in representative matches – unlike the gentlemen and players of ...”

“... like ‘fab’. (It first appeared circa 1957 and became attached to the Beatles around 1963.)In Marcus Collins’s The Beatles and Sixties Britain, Burgess is one of a long list of mainstream commentators (variously Grub or Fleet Street, middlebrow or mandarin) whose reaction to the Beatles was somewhere between a fit of the vapours and fear of imminent ...”

“... aficionados started touring the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified blues ...”

“... arguing that his fictional version of the neighbourhood too closely resembled Black Marseille. James Weldon Johnson, who had spent the 1920s as executive secretary of the NAACP, went further, suggesting that McKay needed to return to America. ‘I feel very strongly that you ought to come and stay. New York is your market, and the United States is your ...”

“... in the face of threats to national security. In The Executive Unbound (2010), they rejected James Madison’s scheme of separating powers, siding instead with Alexander Hamilton, who thought that ‘energy’ in the executive was indispensable for ‘good government’. ‘Unbound’ wasn’t supposed to mean ‘unlimited’: Posner and Vermeule argued ...”

“... were supposed to be. He even found a statue of Sargon (2340-2284 BCE), as ancient for Nabonidus as Marcus Aurelius is for us. He glued it back together and re-erected it. Pierre Briant’s greatest achievement in his encyclopedic history of the Persian Empire, From Cyrus to Alexander, translated, with a few additions, from Histoire de l’Empire perse ...”

“... represents a departure from an earlier tradition. ‘As long as you think you’re white,’ James Baldwin once said, ‘there’s no hope for you.’Attempts to dismantle racism have often subverted its vocabulary, turning epithets into appellations of pride. But anti-racist intellectuals have also been alert to the risk of nativism, of falling deeper ...”

“... efforts at artistic autonomy as more successful than their political initiatives, which included Marcus Garvey’s campaign for a mass return to Africa, and a new claim, subsequently reinforced, to be originators rather than imitators of American culture. She records with considerable vivacity the effect of their arts on the culture at large, and has good ...”

“... unable to raise the revenue to pay the crews. After the Restoration in 1660, both Charles II and James II demonstrated enthusiasm and expertise in nurturing naval expansion. But the Royal Navy’s performance in the Second and Third Dutch Wars was uneven, and political and religious divisions among its officers and men enabled William III and the Dutch fleet ...”