“... Flight into Egypt, for instance, and umpteen pictures of gambling and card games which, even by de la Tour, I find hard to take. Rupert as always looks more carefully than I do and gets more out of it. A terrific picture by Ribera of an old man with the withered and drooping flesh of his arm exactly done (via his ...”

“... to shock whites out of their apathy’. Ellison’s hyper-cerebral protagonist in Invisible Man, who is able to see far beyond his own condition, was a pointed rejoinder to Bigger’s inarticulate and explosive rage.That rage had once been important to Ellison too. During their days in the CPUSA, he had sent a letter to Wright commending Bigger’s ...”

“... preferred today. Enough material there for a whole case-history. Notwithstanding the title of Paul Alexander Juutilainen’s recent film docubiog about Marcuse, Herbert the Hippopotamus, the slack-sphinctered pachyderm in LaRouche’s first sentence refers not to Marcuse, late consort of Korsch, Davis and the Weathermen, nor even to Lyndon Jr’s own ...”

“... These tales of mob and gang will be appreciated by man and boy, but especially by those of us who have survived fifty-odd years of life in Britain. Our day-school years in the Thirties were much influenced by the public school system, expressed in schoolmasters’ aspirations and schoolboys’ comics. Simon Raven’s notorious devotion to that system began when he was only a seven-year-old comic reader, as he admits in The Old School, a loving but mordant survey of the dormitory schools: he went on avidly to Charterhouse and he fancies other men will envy or scorn that experience, as he himself scorns or envies men from rival dormitories ...”

“... and free action, she lamented our modern inability to emulate the heroics of the classical Greek man of action, a ‘doer of great deeds and speaker of great words’. In On Revolution (1963), she revived the 18th-century dream of creating a new political order, defending the American Revolution against its Marxist detractors, yet also criticising the ...”

“... thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half-measures. If he’d raised anything less, of course, as Paul points out, the deacon and several others of us would be out of business or back to Saturday Sabbaths, a sensible diet and no more Christmases. The bodies of the newly dead are not debris or remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They ...”

“... terms, as a rare public instance of the normally suppressed discourse of madness. Now, from the man who coached Foucault in philosophy, we have another bold and engrossing first-person work which could have borne the title ‘Moi Louis Althusser ayant étranglé ma femme ... ’, for L’Avenir dure longtemps is the garlanded Marxist philosopher’s long ...”

“... monument to Picasso was commissioned by Barcelona City Council. It sits on the edge of Parc de la Ciutadella on the busy, dusty downtown street named for Picasso. It has a more mysterious and shadowy presence than any other piece of modern public sculpture in Barcelona, such as Chillida’s stark, severe piece of cast-iron in Plaça del Rei, or ...”

“... and anger upon the self. So it is no surprise that Roger should characterise himself as a bad man: for example, here, in a portrait of the evil, paranoid voyeur. Secret glimpses ... of life proceeding unaware of my watching have always excited me. Of the days of my ministry I remember keenly the lit windows of my unsuspecting parishioners as I ...”

“... by a vitriolic press as tasteless, embarrassing and exhibitionist, and thrived only as a succès de scandale. Alienated from theatrical fashion first by 1950s Absurdism and then by what he describes as ‘a newly influential and resentful 1960s avant-garde’, Miller never recovered his influence or his reputation in the States. With the single exception of ...”

“... two-day ticket at £80, for which I got a red plastic bracelet. I had to keep it on overnight, the man told me; it would be fine in the bath or shower. Not many other people had red bracelets, I couldn’t help but notice. A lot had red ribbons round their necks with ID cards hanging from them – they were Contributors. Others had yellow ribbons, denoting ...”

“... not money but outstanding feelings. He puts a sheaf of them under his pillow. ‘The doomed man’s brain grew warmer and warmer with a sense of communion’ and he starts to write replies. He lies naked on his cot in the July heat, and his one large hand ‘made joyless love to his body, exploring all of those erogenous zones that the fingers of ...”

“... and readers were understood instinctively and by habit to do right by their stomachs: ‘every man in his humour’; ‘you should eat what you are’; ‘chacun à son goût’. Galenic medical theory offered expert explanations of the counsels of proverbial common sense and custom. It was best to eat what was constitutionally similar to you, and when the ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote to his publisher in Paris to suggest that he ask Jean-Paul Sartre for a preface to his anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth. ‘Tell him that every time I sit down at my desk, I think of him.’ For revolutionary intellectuals in the Third World, Sartre seemed miraculously uncontaminated by the paternalism – and hypocrisy – that gave the white left such a bad reputation ...”

“... in their talk, then explains that ‘you suddenly seem to me to be bathed in blood.’ Paul Eluard, Eisenstein’s guest, stands up during the swanky first night of La Voix Humaine to shout Merde! Merde! Merde! and be mobbed – in cartoon prose – by the dinner-jacketed audience of the Comédie Française (‘short fat little arms have seized ...”