“... books furnished Hollywood with five very successful films – Scaramouche, Captain Blood, The Black Swan, which won an Academy Award, and two versions of The Sea Hawk. As indicated by these titles, or even more by the name of Errol Flynn (as star) above two of them, Sabatini was not only a ‘history-teller,’ as George MacDonald Fraser defines his art ...”

“... and supported by a single word or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction’ (Black); the contextual ‘suggests that a search of the context of each metaphor yields ... a set of clues relevant to its interpretation.’ Having reviewed them all. Scheffler rightly emphasises the creative or exploratory role of metaphor. The book is slightly ...”

“... that of Natalie Portman, and Cusk gives plot descriptions of the movies Léon: The Professional, Black Swan and Vox Lux without naming them. The fictional Portman has fictional thoughts in opulent settings and from inside the muted aquarium of a limousine moving through a city, like a series of outtakes from Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, starring ...”

“... full-bodied’, displaying ‘impressive concentration, chewy, highly extracted flavours of black fruits, iron, earth and spicy wood’) with Andrew Jefford in the Financial Times on a Georges Duboeuf 2003 cru Beaujolais (‘This dark wine … helicopters into the mouth with spinning blades of intense fruit,’ combining ‘finesse and elegance with ...”

“... in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from Cambridge, Michael Frayn. Oliver said that he had fried and eaten a placenta. At that time I don’t think I knew what a placenta was except that I knew it didn’t come with chips.11 September. David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he ...”

“... equivalent of dole money. His experiences in the Scotswood district of Newcastle, an unemployment black spot, led him to see something cruelly mistaken in Tebbit’s jibes that the long-term unemployed were somehow deficient in personal responsibility. Whereas Tebbit thought the unemployed should ‘get on their bikes’ to look for work, or, if none was to ...”

“... the lives of tens of thousands of civilians.Among earlier fiction to come out of the civil war, Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost (2000) is set during the early phases and the linked stories in Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll (2014) in its aftermath. There’s also Samanth Subramanian’s compelling non-fiction account, based on interviews with ...”

“... and gender: in the conservative imaginary, compassion would be exploited in the economic realm by black women, and in the judicial realm by black men. In Britain, there was more emphasis on the language of economics, specifically the ‘supply side’ idea that the interests of investors and entrepreneurs were paramount. As ...”

“... a case reported to Haiken by the surgeon Donald Moynihan: The prospective patient was a young black woman whose cornrowed hair and black studies major in college suggested to Moynihan that she was ‘really into the heritage thing’, as did her request that he put a bone through her nose. ‘I respected the deep pride ...”

“... other ruling classes in modern times’. These were not welcome ideas in the time of Malcolm X and Black Nationalism. No less significant was Genovese’s prize-winning Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), a sophisticated, psychologically sensitive and comprehensive social history that remains a classic. Masters and slaves, he ...”

“... Antonov 124 has transported French fighter planes to Venezuela, 132 tons of stage equipment for a Michael Jackson concert, 36,000 cubic feet of cigarettes and a complete bottling plant for Pepsi-Cola. But the pilots, the handlers of the horses and penguins, the airport stevedores and the guards who watch over the depots all remain faceless, without ...”

“... were supposed to have hunted down and murdered Merlin in these woods; the valley was home to Michael Scott, a wizard who appears in Dante’s Inferno. The area was in unruly border country, and it is also on the spine of Scotland, where the waters divide to flow west or east. James Laidlaw’s grandfather Will O’Phaup followed fairies one evening into ...”

“... rights to religious minorities (first Protestants, then Jews), and then, if only temporarily, to black slaves. It did not do similar things for women but Hunt implicitly takes a stand against those authors (especially Carole Pateman and Joan Scott) who see a symbiotic relationship between the rise of equal rights for men and female subjugation, arguing that ...”

“... investigation, it emerged that Doheny’s son had delivered $100,000 to Fall ‘in a little black bag’. It was corruption at the highest levels of government. The Senate hearings began in October 1923 and on 5 June 1924 Doheny was formally indicted. Fall was convicted of accepting the bribe, becoming the first American cabinet member to spend time in ...”

“... superficiality, his book achieves real depth. China first appears in his pages as an emotional black hole. The author’s Chinese friends tell him, for example, that ‘envy, or rather the fear of envy ... is poisoning China.’ And that ‘the deterioration lies everywhere – in the culture, in the people who carry that culture.’ ‘The crux’ is how ...”