“... the wounded Indian troops who were being treated at Brighton Pavilion and in July 1917 addressed Black South African labourers at Abbeville, thanking them for their service on the Western Front, though passing over the racism that had confined them to non-combatant roles. The evidence suggests that George’s respect was often reciprocated. It was white ...”

“... These were daring provocations in a country whose hotels routinely turned him away as a Black man (they would also have been unthinkable in British India). But they titillated staunchly anti-colonialist women, some of whom were recent immigrants themselves, unsure of their position in America. Vivekananda also resisted the assimilation of Vedantism ...”

“... ribaldry and play-acting, all delivered in an unashamedly lower-class fashion. Wedderburn was black, stout, a flamboyant physical presence, and probably not fully literate. He often shared the floor with the impish dwarf Samuel Waddington, another radical tailor, famous for his blasphemous, obscene clowning. In 1830 Wedderburn received another two-year ...”

“... what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, & how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.’ It has to be said that most of the letters are not up to this level, and many are dreadfully dull. But one reads on, waiting for the next surprise, which is likely to come when least ...”

“... engaging chapters in the book are those on Shakespeare, boy actors on the Elizabethan stage and Michael Jackson, all of whom confront us, in Garber’s view, with the radical undecidability that underlies our outrage for disorder. Michael Jackson ‘in performance erases and detraumatises not only the boundaries between ...”

“... and its Metaphors’. In their attempt to answer the intractable ‘why’ of the massacre, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim sense that the contributory factors they painstakingly assemble don’t quite amount to a reason, and reach for the viral theory. ‘Atrocity,’ they opine, ‘is like a virus known to strike soldiers in combat.’ Charlie Company of ...”

“... off a convincing snarl. Yet he is remembered for certain qualities which appreciate over time. Michael Wreszin’s biography succeeds in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true ...”

“... and through: anti-semitic, except when she hoped to benefit from rich Jewish friends; and anti-black (‘Government House with only a coloured staff would put me in my grave,’ she moaned when, many years later, her husband was the Governor of the Bahamas). She was offensive to her servants, and hated the class they came from. Her Fascist sympathies ...”

“... the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile manager and an infant editor. Parnell, Michael Davitt and the Land League were accused of having inspired agrarian outrages including murder, arson, horse-gelding and cattle-houghing. Certainly they had developed ostracism as a weapon, causing it to be christened the ‘Boycott’ after the landlord ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them into models of market behaviour, price volatility, risk profiles, portfolio theory and the Black-Scholes formula for pricing derivatives. Lecturing at MIT and Harvard raised Mandelbrot’s profile and the possibility of a professorship at one or the other, but nothing was offered and he returned to the comfortable world of IBM. He went to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... came alum and English wool, and then, momentously, in 1501, the Portuguese trade in spices – black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, ginger. Following after were merchants trading paper, gems, and pearls from India; and soon, the trade in printed books, in cochineal and vermillion, silks and metalware, copper and silver; in sugar, ivory, gold; in Chinese ...”

“... bodies. Beit Sahour is a smaller town on the edge of Bethlehem. Angles are important here too, as Michael Awwad, a well-to-do Palestinian shopkeeper, explains with a diagram drawn on the counter of his hardware shop. In July 1988, he begins, Edmon Ghanem, a 17-year-old Palestinian, was walking by a house in Beit Sahour when a large stone fell from the balcony ...”

“... is no coincidence that the best political styles belong to Enoch Powell, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn and Michael Foot, all men ‘committed to working on and defending the idea of the United Kingdom’. As it happens, Mr Powell himself contributes a piece on ‘The Language of Politics’, in which he concludes that although speeches are briefer and politicians a ...”