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“... lost the light garment veiling her torso, lost the rounded breast-band that gathered her milk-white bosom – all of them, slipped from her body every which way, now at her feet become the salty ripples’ playthings. The paradoxical combination of the deserted Ariadne’s longing gaze after the departing Theseus and the reader’s voyeuristic gaze at ...”

“... of the vans, been asked for additional paperwork by landlords (perhaps more often than their white counterparts) and wondered if, deep down, this country really wants them. The news of the past month will have deepened their anxiety. Is​ the prime minister a racist? It’s a provocative question that has been asked repeatedly since Home Office rhetoric ...”

“... Maisie knew, The Go-Between, many other novels and stories. Such children are at the centre of William Trevor’s tenth novel and David Profumo’s first; or rather, Trevor seems to have chosen to place young Tom both centrally and peripherally (as children often are, in fiction and in life), while Profumo makes young James the very eyes and ears of his ...”

“... now being tried in Denver, the book in question is The Turner Diaries. The FBI, who have labelled William L. Pierce’s prudently pseudonymous novel ‘the bible of the racist right’, didn’t take long to leak the information that it accompanied Timothy McVeigh on his (alleged) bombing raid on 19 April 1995. Reference to The Turner Diaries was prominent in ...”

“... has always given satisfaction, whether it was a Last Goodnight, or seeing your love dressed all in white, but come back only from the grave. The Victorians revelled in it. Stephen Foster’s audience grieved for Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, the lost one ‘who comes not again’. The big Romantics all had their more portentous versions, from Lucy ceasing ...”

“... Highland charge. He boasted that ‘fire by ranks’ would deal with it, and told his friends at White’s Club that he would sweep the rebels out of Britain with two regiments of dragoons. But outside Falkirk, his guns sank axle-deep into the mud as he tried to occupy a high moorland position he had never seen or reconnoitred, while ‘a ferocious ...”

“... such as Harriet Wilson, the author of Our Nig. In the sections which describe her life at the White House the stance changes to that of a discreet observer, but even there occasional touches of gentle melodrama still remain. The three chapters (there are 15 in all) devoted to her 30 years as a slave consist of carefully selected incidents, which, as she ...”

“... head – the queen)’ The other dominant strand in Nicholson’s work consists of white or near white reliefs. Words like ‘purity’ and ‘balance’ stick to descriptions of them like a burr to a sock. It was these constructions of overlapping circles and rectangles that he finally came to concentrate on ...”

“... mines (they would never have come if there was smallpox). There were hundreds of deaths, black and white, before health inspectors managed to have quarantine and innoculation reintroduced. Some people did see Rhodes as he really was. One was Henry Labouchère, who described Rhodes as ‘a vulgar promoter masquerading as a patriot and the figurehead of a gang ...”

“... There’s an excellent fifty-second song by the White Stripes called ‘Little Room’, which goes like this: well you’re in your little room and you’re working on something good but if it’s really good you’re gonna need a bigger room and when you’re in the bigger room you might not know what to do you might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room It is concerned, not unobviously, with a certain kind of success, and how not only to cope with it but to sustain it, too (incidentally, note the nice shift from ‘your’ to ‘the ...”

“... this was the story, still all too familiar, of racial discrimination and the brutal injustice of white rule. The Osage Nation are a Native American people consisting, today, of more than 10,000 members, many of whom live on tribal lands in Oklahoma. At one time, the Osage were powerful and widespread, with territory that extended deep into Missouri, Arkansas ...”

“... set out their ‘pathways to impact’.* ‘Success as a Knowledge Economy’, a 2016 government White Paper, rehearsed the usual clichés about the importance to the economy of research and tuition, but its true purpose was the construction of a genuinely competitive market in higher education, with new ‘providers’ entering and existing ones exiting. An ...”

“... period. In his fascinating new book, Professor Duby stresses that his subject, the knight-errant William Marshal, was never alone: ‘Who is ever alone at the beginning of the 13th century but the mad, the possessed – marginal figures who are hunted down? An orderly world requires that each man remain swathed in a fabric of solidarities, of friendships, in ...”

“... Kathy Acker, wild and woolly avatar of William Burroughs, is also one of the Blasted Allegorists, contemporary American artists whose self-important and talent-free doodles about Life, the Universe and Everything are hyped by Brian Wallis in his Introduction, a piece of writing conceivably worse than the pieces it introduces: For the writers in this book, these critical forms, such as interviews, monologues, jokes, dream narratives and parables, oppose the imposed narrative structure, the unquestioned hierarchy of characters, and the easy closure of much conventional – or even modernist – literature ...”

“... Intelligence Agency, Bill Casey, devised a plan for revenge. One of the CIA’s top agents, William Buckley, was posted to Beirut to implement it. In March 1984, Buckley was taken prisoner and tortured. Casey’s brilliant plan ended in the deaths or hasty flights of several of the CIA’s agents in the area. Casey ordered that a photograph of the ...”