“... and the rhythms of jazz and blues. Through New Beacon Books, a radical bookshop and publisher in North London, Johnson met the Trinidadian poet and activist John La Rose, who became his mentor. He was also introduced to Caribbean intellectuals including Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and Sam Selvon.With Selvon’s encouragement, Johnson abandoned his attempts to ...”

“... pondered this question the career of Jacques Doriot has always had a special fascination. Now Jean-Paul Brunet has ransacked just about everything – including police files – in order to put the full story together. He has an amazing story to tell. Doriot was the only child of a working-class family, his father a blacksmith forced into factory work and a ...”

“... was executed and the Kingdom of God failed to materialise, his followers reworked his message. Paul taught that Jesus had been resurrected bodily up to heaven and would return at any moment to gather his believers. It seems that Paul at first assumed he would live to see that day, then came to imagine an interim state ...”

“... a lot of time for a film Hollywood considered an ‘epic flop’. Its only defender was the star, Paul Newman, who bravely called it ‘the most significant film I’ve ever made and the best’. He and Stone came out of it as friends, but reviews and box office were dismal. Stone was the screenwriter of record and in his memoir of the 1960s, Prime Green, he ...”

“... the games’ participants. The workers’ sports movement, which had four million members across North America and Europe, was created by social democratic parties and trade unions and offered an inclusive model of sport, favouring participation over excellence and rejecting the rising tide of nationalism that accompanied Olympic sport. In 1925 it staged the ...”

“... on the evening of 7 November 1940, at a dance at the Crystal Ballroom in Fargo, North Dakota. It’s the closing number, rousing but rough, as though they had no formal arrangement; they never did record it commercially. (Ellington recorded it in 1928.) The tempo is uncommonly fast for this song, they abandon most of the melody, and ...”

“... criticism directed at him or his work by his friends. When the arch-Catholic poet and playwright Paul Claudel begged him not to publish an overtly gay passage in his 1914 novel Les Caves du Vatican, Gide corresponded with him at length (and agreed to the publication of their complete correspondence). He did not drop the offending passage – in fact he and ...”

“... threatens to stifle for ever the essential life of the characters. Think, for instance, of Paul Morel, who is left at the end of Sons and Lovers totally bereft, but walking towards – well, what? Like Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl, like Aaron Sisson, Gilbert Noon has to get right out and become ‘unEnglished’, as Lawrence puts it. So he is ...”

“... and almost never – a further compliment – to the contemporary writers he most resembles, Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami, whose amiable postmodern noirs unfold in urban labyrinths and feature cerebral men searching for their own identities, and enigmatic women with an alarming tendency to vanish. He has produced novels with fantastic industry, and ...”

“... of the fantastic’ for the rest of New York. But his heart belongs to the Manhattan grid, the 12 north-south avenues and 155 east-west streets drawn on open land in 1807. The grid was a piece of real estate speculation (John Jacob Astor made his fortune not by trading furs, as American folklore has it, but by buying up blocks as the city pushed ...”

“... playne harts doe in the faces rest; Where can wee find two better Hemispheares, Without sharpe North, without declining West? What ever dyes, was not mixt equally. If our two Loves bee One, or Thou and I Love so alike that none doe slacken, none can dye. The poem describes the erotic glow at the beginning of an affair. ‘Countrey pleasures’ contains a ...”

“... Kaminskys might have been among them, had it not been for the efforts of Adolfo’s older brother, Paul, who successfully petitioned the Argentine consul in Paris. In January 1944, they were released. ‘Why us, and why not them?’ Adolfo wondered. In Paris, he bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But ...”

“... near the UN building and Ralph Bunche public schools dotted across the land – including one just north of Manhattan’s Morningside Park, four blocks from my office. But Bunche is no longer a household name, and while the children entering that school can surely tell you something about Martin Luther King Jr, and probably about Malcolm X too, I wonder what ...”

“... of the people’, the construction of the Myitsone dam, a vast and destructive Chinese project in north-east Burma, would be suspended. Then in October two hundred political prisoners were released, followed by 651 more in January, among them Burma’s most famous and long incarcerated dissidents. A festival of independent film took place in Rangoon organised ...”

“... very old ones, many of them doing more than one job. After 29 years in Parliament the 81-year-old Paul Flynn has made his front bench debut as both shadow leader of the house and shadow Welsh secretary. Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have also been abandoned by several of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in ...”