“... whites. These abolished slavery – they had no choice – but enacted a series of laws called the Black Codes to define the freedom African Americans now enjoyed. They had virtually no civil or political rights, and all adult black men were required to sign a labour contract with a white employer at the beginning of each ...”

“... still a long way off. In a shed at the bottom of the garden they would imitate her, shrieking: ‘Benjamin! Benjamin! Show yourself, ye wee devil!’ Benjy, the youngest, did not like this game. ‘Why d’you pick on me? Why always me?’ But they would goad him: ‘...”

“... is that of Reubeni’s appearance. The contemporary consensus was that his skin was dark, even ‘black’. His follower Daniel da Pisa referred to his ‘black visage’; another witness described him as ‘black as a Nubian’. In the 16th century, Reubeni’s dark skin would have been ...”

“... babies and endangered species. This logo, as it would now be called, of the kneeling, shackled black was clear, compact, memorable, touching, and yet entirely decorous – with the added attraction, as Hugh Honour astutely points out in The Image of the Black, of hinting at conversion as well as ...”

“... you first think of, the Great Wandering Albatross. It’s either the Sooty Albatross or the Black-Browed Albatross (both of which are much smaller and easier to hang round your neck if you feel guilty about having killed one). Butch Cassidy did not die in a gunfight in Bolivia in 1909, as portrayed in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: in 1925 he ...”

“... revivals. To be sure, a few blemishes mar the renaissance: the periodic killing of unarmed black men by the police, for example, or the persistent failure of the public school system. Census statistics, moreover, reveal that nearly all the benefit of the 1990s boom has gone to the richest fifth of the population. Always a city of ‘Progress and ...”

“... Republicans gave him standing ovations with an abandon the US Congress had previously reserved for Benjamin Netanyahu; but this time, with the exception of one moment, Democrats stayed seated. With great fanfare, Trump introduced another of his special guests, the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó. He pledged that Guaidó would soon be installed as the ...”

“... which made King a national figure; the confrontation in the streets of Birmingham between young Black demonstrators and ‘Bull’ Connor’s dogs and fire hoses; and the march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery. Eig’s admiration for King is obvious, but he is not reluctant to point out failures, such as the Chicago Freedom Movement and the Poor ...”

“... was to play into the hands of the savage enemies of reason who murdered his friend Walter Benjamin. But reason was part of the problem as well, which only a certain dialectical or deconstructive style of thought could unlock. How could one retrieve that otherness that Western reason has suppressed without falling prey to a barbarous irrationalism? It ...”

“... soldier in representations of the war is almost always white. When one directs attention to the Black experience, Delmont writes, ‘nearly everything’ about that war looks different. What, for example, was the conflict’s purpose? Roosevelt’s claim that it was being fought to ensure universal enjoyment of the Four Freedoms (freedom of speech and ...”

“... articles; in AI-generated images (‘in thirty minutes of clicking he has landed on not a single Black face’); in a serial killer’s ability to evade capture for years (‘his victims were mostly Black women, many of them sex workers’); in the microaggressions he experiences as a ...”

“... Beings Commanded: Paint the Upper-Right Corner Black!’ (1969) ‘Constructivist’ (1968) ‘Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan)’ (1974-78) ‘Watchtower’ (1984)PreviousNext Born in Silesia in 1941, Polke fled west with his family twice, first to Thuringia in 1945 and then to Düsseldorf in 1953, where he ...”

“... of Defence only in 1995. Even longer under cover was the map on which Richard Oswald, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and secretary to the British delegation which negotiated the Treaty of Paris in 1782, marked in red the proposed frontier between the United States and Canada. It was provided for the private use of his British colleagues and gives more ...”

“... garb of a Spanish inquisitor or lord chancellor, severe and upright as he sets down names on a ‘Black List’ which contains captions such as ‘The Man of the People has lived too long for us!’ Clayton uncovers the motive with admirable lucidity: ‘Freedom of speech was a professional necessity for Gillray and he was always robust in its defence, and ...”

“... Benjamin​ Moser begins his biography with a bang: ‘Susan Sontag was America’s last great literary star.’ In my gaudier moments I prefer to think of Sontag as American literature’s first and last great screen star. Transcending staid text, she was projected into the avid imaginations of legions of onlookers who didn’t know Walter Benjamin from Walter Brennan ...”