“... humour, neither of them from the narrator’s point of view. The image of the acrobats is from Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, and isn’t, on its first mention in that book, a dream: ‘The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling from each other’s ...”

“... a lock-in after hours, and we’re not home till three that morning. The phone goes early. It’s Michael Keohane, ringing from Sligo, where he’s president of the Yeats Society. We talk, more about the Middle East than Yeats, and he invites us to the opening of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo that Sunday, and to the party afterwards in Lissadell ...”

“... the film, too), imagines as a reality what for his wife was only a thought. He sees it in black and white, as if it was a steamy, pre-homicide sequence in a film noir. And finally – this may be just another way of stating the previous argument – words are for Kubrick part of the texture of a film, a feature of its sound system as much as a means ...”

“... the enviably beautiful Rose’s parentage and of her clandestine marriage to the Earl on the same black day, endeavours to pressure her favourite into renouncing his bride. All this, once we have swallowed Sophia Lee, is predictable enough (though conflating Mary’s execution with the fortunes of Essex is an original touch: the Queen of Scots is still alive ...”

“... crisis at this period. Even if we take his word for it that Breakfast of Champions, despite its black themes, betokened recovery, and a psychic breakfasting, by Vonnegut the man, it is evident that Vonnegut the novelist was not at ease. He puts himself into the story – which is an oddity in his fiction – and has himself saying: ‘this is a very bad ...”

“... circlings of the Kaaba, the circumambulation that induces a kind of vertigo, the mystery of the ...”

“... avoided most of his fellow actors socially, and regarded the newly founded Garrick Club as ‘a black-guard place’.) In the everyday life of the Regency playhouses, heaven knows, there was plenty to confirm this anti-theatrical prejudice, and plenty to try tempers much more pliant than Macready’s. The diary of Drury Lane’s manager, James Winston, has ...”

“... and liberty tradition’ of the heirs of Runnymede. Defending the book against criticism from Michael Ignatieff, and thinking, perhaps, of a continuation of the line connecting two European revolutions that so preoccupied him, the French and the Russian, Conquest described the European Union as an ‘(immensely corrupt) bureaucratic and regulationist ...”

“... cattail’. Then he has to stay put, from mid-March to the first week in April, hanging out with Michael, the Fish and Wildlife Warden, and Rollin the 82-year-old twitcher, just watching, feeling homesick, writing down Rollin’s reminiscences, leafing through the Gideon Bible in his motel room. If that is what some phases of the journey were like, well ...”

“... in general in New York an audience is either young or old (in the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell). The audience for James Baldwin that evening could not be so easily categorised: it was, I suppose, half ...”

“... This wasn’t her last run-in with the authorities: her connection to anarchist politics and the Black freedom struggle made her a constant target of police surveillance and harassment. Later, when she moved to San Francisco, ‘the FBI was at my front door every night, banging … I was sending different kids to the door because everybody grown up at the ...”

“... coup which brought Louis Napoleon to power. As these two accomplished linguists cruised across the Black Sea towards the Crimea, initial contact between them was hampered by the fact that Saint-Arnaud was too ill to leave his cabin and Lord Raglan with his one arm was unable to climb down the side of the ship. In any case, for all his fabled courtesy and ...”

“... was led away. The two white lawyers went off for lunch at the club.The other vision is a tangle of black ironwork, an ancient lift shaft loud with clanks and groans in Denison House, near Victoria station. Here, in the final years of the empire, was a rookery of remarkable men and women whose life mission was to denounce the empire’s crimes, to give British ...”

“... demagoguery. But to see a true analogy for an Obama rally, one need only attend almost any large black church on a Sunday morning, and listen to the preacher, his sermon kept aloft by the continuous vocal participation of the congregants. ‘A-men!’ they shout; ‘That’s right!’; ‘Yes, sir!’; ‘Oh, my sweet ...”

“... his stories concerned a don and a colleague, a nervous lady, who were doing the B. Lit. viva of a black man. The male don has a sudden fit, jumps to his feet, shouts, splutters, and turns coal black on the instant. The lady thus abruptly outnumbered runs from the room with outcries and the two ...”