“... a genre called Black Naturalism which encompassed such writers as Richard Wright, Ann Petry and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Black Naturalists found naturalism a ready-made mode for representing life under white supremacy. For many Black Americans, there was always a boundary in sight, setting a limit on how prosperous they could be, how happy, how free. I can ...”

“... could not permit my mind to be profaned by such intellectual whorishness’) and wrote an essay on Paul Valéry instead. ‘To know you is a calamity,’ one of his classmates told him.Schwartz would sequester himself in his room, keen to ‘impress the boys with his habit of solitude and concentration of study’. His letters to Julian Sawyer, his only close ...”

“... in the town in 1946. I knew some of these people: Dan Bolger, for example, whose grandfather, Paul, had donated money in 1846. Dan Bolger had a shop in the town. It was hard to think of him, or any of these people, having grandparents who knew ‘bitter hunger, starvation and death’. Most of them had inherited property and exuded a certain ...”

“... offered the inspiration for ‘Pierre Menard’ than his father’s vain request. The book was Paul Valéry’s Introduction à la poétique. Williamson writes: ‘The same text, according to Borges, could mean different things to different readers in different periods, and he quoted a line from a poem by Cervantes to show that a reader in the 20th century ...”

“... a group of young intellectuals from different disciplines – it included Cardoso from sociology, Paul Singer from economics, José Artur Giannotti from philosophy, Roberto Schwarz from literature – started a seminar on Capital that became a legend, lasting five years and affecting the atmosphere of the Faculty for ten. When the Armed Forces seized power in ...”

“... vocabulary of ancient Athenian politics as against that of Jefferson, the moral vocabulary of St Paul as against that of Freud, the jargon of Newton versus that of Aristotle, the idiom of Blake rather than that of Dryden – it is difficult to think of the world as making one of these better than another, of the world as deciding between them. When the ...”

“... one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem . . . As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent and hatred were all around us. Baldwin began with a very great subject: the drama of his own life ...”

“... neck. He was a small man with a folksy didacticism and a strong resemblance to the late magician Paul Daniels. He sat at the head of a long table. In front of him was a copy of the daily Rzeczpospolita with a picture of Theresa May on the front page. It was mid-January and May had just made her speech declaring that Britain, as part of leaving the ...”

“... successor. Brown let it be known that he didn’t approve (in this he was egged on by his friend Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail) and that was that. In other respects gambling reform in Britain followed the path Budd laid down for it. The Gambling Act of 2005 essentially treated the activity as part of the leisure industry, something that needed its own rules ...”

“... such cases was allegedly stood down. Simply by virtue of living as long as he did, Hobsbawm must lay claim to one of the biggest PFs in MI5’s vast back catalogue. Then there’s the smell of the file, the physical residue of ink and carbon and onion paper and the many hands that passed over it, fingertips licked to separate the pages; and the distinct ...”

“... the reasons for the enemy’s victory, ‘it was not only in the field that intellectual causes lay at the root of our defeat.’ (‘Ce n’est pas seulement sur le terrain militaire que notre défaite a eu ses causes intellectuelles’). Viewed morally and aesthetically, Strange Defeat is an impressive document, an indictment written at white heat by a ...”

“... Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul Jennings that had a tongue-twister about ‘tuskless rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate ...”

“... the right hand, oompah for the left: a demi-style that would stand him in good stead when the act lay fallow, and assist an inborn facility for seducing whole lines of chorus girls. The result placed a built-in ceiling on his competence, but it worked nicely as a sight gag for the eye and ear. Harpo would emulate him in this as in other respects, but he was a ...”

“... Alinksy, the Chicago-based community activist and author of Rules for Radicals (1971), Mark and Paul Engler (This Is an Uprising, 2016) and Srdja Popovic, the Serbian advocate of ‘laughtivism’ (Blueprint for Revolution, 2015): XR insists that its interventions should both be fun and poke fun. Gene Sharp, the author of The Politics of Non-Violent Action ...”