“... military and the armaments manufacturers and it is not new. I am reading Alabaster Tombs by Arthur Gardner who, discussing the representations of 15th-century armour on church monuments, writes: ‘It is recorded that after a battle the squires and armourers held a sort of inquest over the bodies of the slain in order to discuss how best to prevent or ward off ...”

“... was homosexual.’ Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘At some previous time the ...”

“... Cloak and Dagger and lingered in Hollywood as a screenwriter, socialising with Gary Cooper and Ava Gardner. This sybaritic idyll ended with the expiration of his studio contract, and he returned to New York divorced, unemployed and broke. Then came the call from Wisner.Wisner had left the law to become deputy assistant secretary of state for occupied areas, a ...”

“... Beasts in interest. The volume has a valuable seventy-page introduction and some useful notes by John Haffenden, who arranges the material as far as possible in chronological order. The play or melodrama, Three Stories, was written when the poet was 20, and performed, with him in the cast, by the Cambridge ADC. Long supposed to have been lost as Empson ...”

“... so enthusiastically that she swept aside the dimension of fiction altogether. The latest Ava Gardner movie was just the latest report on what promiscuous Ava had been up to since you saw her last: the changes of costume and setting and name were feeble disguises, and didn’t fool grandma for a minute. She was there to witness when Joan Fontaine, for all ...”

“... seen Marie Antoinette six times by the time she married Juan Peron. It’s a relief to turn to Ava Gardner, who was not impressed by Hollywood, and fully expected them not to be impressed by her. Of MGM, she said: ‘They never took much interest in me. I can’t say I blame them.’ She was spotted by a talent scout and used to say she cursed the day her ...”

“... a problem. Many of the ‘first families of Virginia’ prided themselves on being descendants of John Rolfe, an early settler at Jamestown, and his wife, the Indian ‘princess’ Pocahontas. The new ‘one-drop rule’ meant that they might find themselves prohibited from marrying a white person – or even classed as ‘coloured’ themselves. After much ...”

“... realist? His engagement with the Communist Party – he had been a leader of the Chicago John Reed Club, the CPUSA writers’ group, and published journalism in The New Masses – contributed, but Wright’s relationship with the party had always been stormy, particularly when it came to aesthetics. His 1937 manifesto, ‘Blueprint for Negro ...”

“... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...”