“... into a revolt. Still, when Republicans were roaming through Cork and Tipperary shooting at the Black and Tans, it was possible to feel heroic. But it must have been hard to feel heroic in the Civil War and the years that followed its crimes. Yet O’Faolain’s early stories want you to feel that life in Ireland was a romance, and sometimes an epic. I have ...”

“... Vanity Fair in full make-up and a bulging décolletage, her arms around the bare biceps of the two black bodyguards she calls ‘my centurions’. In the introduction to Sex, Art and American Culture, a bizarre grab-bag of book reviews, interviews, transcribed lectures, classroom notes and personal memorabilia, Paglia gleefully provides an annotated ...”

“... of Stan without his knowledge. At first, the hints of menace, guilt and racial tension – Gary is Black, Stan is not, and the episode is told from Stan’s point of view – seem to enter the territory of Michael Haneke’s Caché, but Ridgway’s story is subtler, less gothic. Stan always knows who’s sending the ...”

“... Touching Feeling, the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes its strange and haunting black and white cover photograph as ‘the catalyst that impelled me to assemble the book in its present form’. It depicts a woman clumsily embracing an object that resembles an enormous wasps’ nest made of sticks and twine. The woman’s eyes are shut, and ...”

“... his friend’s peculiar death (Jarrell was sideswiped by a car in the course of an evening walk): black-gloved, black-coated, you plod out stubbornly as if in lockstep to grasp your blank not-I at the foot of the tunnel … as if asleep, Child Randall, greeting the car, and approving – your harsh luminosity. It was never ...”

“... whites who fled Queens and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s for the Long Island suburbs to escape black migration. They went one way and Trump another, but both were repelled by Manhattan’s racial liberalism, which was seen as an insult to and impingement on their own status from those above and below them.Trump’s loathing and bullying are among the few ...”

“... up through years of familiarity and ‘surrogate parenting’. Thus when a white madam said of her black maid, ‘she’s one of the family,’ it was not entirely (or not only) a ‘sentimental obfuscation’.My parents too, like most people of their class, habitually spoke of their servants as ‘part of the family’; and for us children, wrapped in the ...”

“... with a great appetite for the written word, both in Latin and in vernacular languages. After the Black Death the economy of Latin Europe provided new opportunities for enterprising peasants and for migrants to the towns. Fifteenth-century domestic architecture attests to prosperity; court cultures flourished. This was the golden age of Burgundy – of ...”

“... 1943 Klein asked Milner, whose practice she was supervising, to take on her 11-year-old grandson Michael (the boy known as Simon in Milner’s 1952 case study on symbol formation), who was ‘suffering from a loss of talent for schoolwork’. Klein neither recused herself from supervising the analysis, nor held back her disapproval of Milner’s ...”

“... as ‘the practical expression’ of ‘the spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz’. (Weight misses Michael Foot’s 1949 pamphlet on domestic reform entitled Who Are the Patriots Now?) A different kind of identity came to fruition during the Attlee Administration: new institutions were called ‘National’ or ‘British’ instead of ‘Royal’ – the ...”

“... David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall meet!’ It would have been equally ...”

“... a cartoon or an illustration dated 1942, entitled ‘Gobbling Market’ and meant as a satire on black marketeers. It was for Punch but it could just as easily have been for Der Stürmer, as all the black marketeers are strongly semitic in features, some as demonic as in the worst Nazi propaganda. The expert makes no ...”

“... the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick black smoke. Urban walkers perk up; we’re back in the shit. The noise. The action. The situation, at the junction of the North Circular and the Lee Valley Trading Estate, is readable. It’s what we are used to, what we advocate; faux Americana, waste ...”

“... here. ‘But,’ piped up the intellectual, ‘of course it’s true that the anti’s, led by Michael Foot, are completely antediluvian.’ Crossman had by this time come to terms with the fact that, as he had noted in 1952, what the Labour Party ‘really can’t abide is thrashing out Socialist policy among themselves. It is this solidarity which keeps ...”

“... of biography format with a leavening of category entries on such topics as ‘Pseudonyms’, ‘Black Feminist Criticism’, ‘Science Fiction’. There are no plot summaries, no entries on works or on principal characters in works, no cross-reference one-liners. The gaze is unblinkingly on women’s lives as the ground from which women’s writing ...”