“... rights movement in which her father, Ralph Allen, played an important role. He was one of two white college students who joined 38 Black activists in a voting rights campaign. The Baptist church where they met to read scripture and sing spirituals was invaded by law enforcement officers, resulting in arrests, imprisonment and, ultimately, the burning down ...”

“... spared. She went to London, alone, and turned up at the Slade determined to enrol as a student; William Coldstream, the Slade’s director, happened to walk by while she was pleading her case with the receptionist, listened to her story and, without further ado, accepted her. The film is haunting, and its two non-actor stars are its enthralling ...”

“... recent novel deals with one of the most fraught subjects in US history: the long march of General William Tecumseh Sherman in the final months of the Civil War. The election of 1864 was a referendum on whether the Union should fight to achieve total victory or seek a negotiated peace, which would almost certainly have required the Union to rescind its ...”

“... general, Emily Thornberry, for conveying a ‘sense of disrespect’ towards the owner of a white van. Ed Balls, having given up his brief attempt at an attack on the coalition’s austerity policy, courts respectability by pledging to honour all the coalition government’s spending cuts. Rachel Reeves gratuitously alienates the unemployed and welfare ...”

“... the Bush administration than all the press secretaries, publicists, apologists and spinners in the White House itself. Defending W, however, does not appear to have been the intention of the author. Several years ago, Sittenfeld wrote a hyperbolic essay for Salon.com that set out the paradox of her contempt for George Bush (whose policies she regarded as ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... greatness. They have been performed magnificently by, for example, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix and the White Stripes. Then there was Donovan, a bit like Dan Bern without the sense of humour, or the critical distance. A.J. Weberman, self-styled Dylanologist, burrowed into the singer’s rubbish bins to try to make sense of him. And countless others have applied ...”

“... away from her and died of pneumonia in a rural stationmaster’s house a few days later. Although William Nickell and the contemporary Russian journalists whose work he has explored for The Death of Tolstoy try to make an enigma of the 82-year-old writer’s ‘complex and provocative’ nocturnal flight from his ancestral home, the count had been brooding ...”

“... should ‘use newspapers the way private diaries and personal letters were once used. At white heat, in the rush of an emotion, stimulated by an event, you write your reflections, hoping that someone will read them and then forget them.’ He appears to have missed the arrogance of the verb ‘use’ and the self-importance of thus imposing upon ...”

“... It is due for general release early next year. Available colours will include black, orange, grey, white and blue, or to put it in Google-speak: ‘charcoal, tangerine, shale, cotton, sky’. The prototypes have already gone out and are being used by the first generation of – sensitive readers will want their sickbags to hand – ‘Glass Explorers’. The ...”

“... author proud, for this is a great slab of a book, on heavy paper, with over two hundred black and white illustrations, mostly disposed in wide margins, and there are 17 colour plates. The book is carefully designed, though less carefully copy-edited and proof-read; perhaps having it set in Hong Kong and printed in Singapore created problems. Still, the volume ...”

“... the Wild West’, Dylan’s Christian conversion, and his appearance as ‘Jewish Amerindian and White Negro’. It is all a bit too much, but at least Mellers takes care, unlike Jonathan Cott in his expensive, over-reverential tome: one more coffee-table book. It may seem a bit Dylanesque (i.e. slightly cruel) but I finished Cott’s book without being able ...”

“... are to be found in the index: Piltdown, Paul Kammerer of The Midwife Toad and the infamous William T. Summerlin. This last is the only case of a fraud in which I have been involved as a witness for the prosecution: Summerlin worked at the largest cancer research institute in the world, the Sloan-Kettering in New York, under the patronage of its ...”

“... He has views, he shouts, cajoles, threatens and sneers. He worships Kleist and Stendhal, loathes William Styron and Sainte-Beuve, is conspicuously silent about Flaubert and seems to have a love-hate relationship with Nabokov. He delights in summoning up his rhetoric of loathing for the Nazis and the Mafia and in distilling hard, frequently paradoxical ...”

“... the concert to himself. It was not quite a disaster. Edward had arranged for slides to be made of William Blake’s engravings for the Book of Job, and projected huge enlargements onto white sheets. Everyone was bored by the Oratorio, but found the engravings an impressive spectacle, except Misia Sert, the Parisian culture ...”