“... suggests an additional triumph, or reminds us of an old one: a triumph of tone. I can’t judge William Weaver’s translation, but unless he has improved on Calvino, it must give a fair measure of the style: precise, wry, lucid, analytic, subtly lyrical. What is delicately mocked, in this impeccably straight-faced prose, is writing itself: the ambitions ...”

“... upheavals – were linked, and should be treated in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved ...”

“... or anything composed in a language other than English, or by anyone who wasn’t a white man. He had as little time for science fiction that didn’t follow his own strict prescriptions as he did for ‘so-called mainstream fiction’ – a category that he seems to have defined in contrast to science fiction, on the one hand, and the work of ...”

“... perhaps the single-minded self-absorption, to be a superstar – he’s had to be content with the White House. How much his self-portrait owes to his co-author is hard to tell. The tone is that of practised self-deprecation, modest, sincere and common-sensical – a more articulate version of Mr Deeds’s gee-gosh folksiness. Guile sometimes shows through, as ...”

“... York as part of Walter Arensberg’s circle, which included Duchamp, Picabia, Varèse, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. She sketched Freud in Vienna and lived among the avant garde in postwar Berlin. In the Twenties, when American expatriates flocked to Paris, Loy was there too. In accounts of those years, Loy’s charm and wit are emphasised, and her ...”

“... knows the pictures: ranks of small children, smiling ones pushed to the front, the boys with Just William socks and the girls with brutally chopped hair, and each one with a luggage label on the collar and a gas-mask over the shoulder. Few people can have missed all the recent media stories about the evacuation of more than a million city children as soon as ...”

“... to immigration to pornography. A forthcoming essay collection edited by Ryan Johnson and William Cohen will be entitled Filth. The interest in ‘waste-theory’ may be seen as a recyclable and non-biodegradable byproduct of a number of related tendencies in contemporary literary studies: 1) the borrowing of critical paradigms from science and social ...”

“... dumbness, oblivion and hard labour. In 1953: ‘I only want to be left alone in my little white bed with my book and my seconal and my last libation. Tonight I’ve drunk inordinately, at least a dozen hi balls during the past eight hours.’ Three days later: ‘I have washed a “pinkie” down with Scotch and am naked on the bed with my journal and ...”

“... Curriculum, and Evelyn Waugh saw the possibility of comedy in the matter before anybody else, his William Boot a writer keen to make the rat-tat-tat of his typewriter fall into sync with the sound of gunfire over the hill. In America, a season in France or a period in the foothills of Spain was once thought to be a rite of passage for a first-rate writer of ...”

“... out of complacency, and more alert to the suffering of others. Molesworth had been taught by William Gaskell, the Unitarian minister and husband of Elizabeth Gaskell, who was another accomplished practitioner of supernatural fiction. Gaskell’s ghost stories, more ambitious and substantial than Molesworth’s (try her unforgettable ‘Old Nurse’s ...”

“... the circumstances, unavoidable.The Smiths were a family of significance. Bodichon’s grandfather William inherited a great wholesale grocery business, and in the 1780s and 1790s bought himself social and political status. The family home in Clapham was exchanged for a magnificent town house by Hyde Park and two hundred acres in Essex. He acquired Old Masters ...”

“... were as real to him as Joan of Arc’s voices, Blake’s angels or Elwood P. Dowd’s giant white rabbit, Harvey. Trollope’s obsession about his characters originates in the kind of trauma that classically deranges sensitive minds. His wretchedness as a schoolboy is famous from the extended descriptions of it in An Autobiography. He uses terms like ...”

“... among the most famous photographs ever taken. So stark is the contrast between Aldrin in his white spacesuit and the empty grey desert he stands on – the black of space beyond, the sun out of sight – that while it is, obviously, a photograph of a man on the moon it is also a picture of the living and the dead. For Armstrong, who always saw things ...”

“... people possessed an essence and genius different from, and even superior to, that of Europeans or white people. This view was mocked by some African artists, intellectuals and political rivals. ‘A tiger doesn’t proclaim his tigritude,’ Wole Soyinka said. ‘He pounces.’ But négritude was the animating spirit of Fesman, which was a huge ...”

“... the reader through the public furores – the outcry over her 1966 pronouncement that ‘the white race is the cancer of human history,’ for example, used as a cudgel against her by conservative foes until their arms went numb – and developments in her personal life familiar from previous biographies, memoirs and profiles. While not stinting on ...”