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“... of a Daughter-in-Law’, ‘Grandmothers’. If we are allowed ‘Trying to talk with a man’, everything vehement, and lesbian, from the poet’s last decade has been suppressed. All this matters because compilation is expensive when there are royalties to pay. Volumes like the Faber Book can’t appear often, and those that establish themselves ...”

“... the plantocracy in Saint-Domingue, James wrote a play celebrating him as an anti-colonial hero (Paul Robeson took the lead role: he had admired Louverture since he was a teenager). In 1998, Toussaint’s remains were interred at the Panthéon: he was commemorated as a ‘freedom fighter, architect of the abolition of slavery and Haitian hero’, although he ...”

“... stick. One of my earliest memories of Brixton Prison is being woken one evening by the sounds of a man crying in the yard. Climbing up to the bars of my cell in A ‘Seg’, I looked down to see a grey-haired prisoner, obviously blind or with seriously impaired sight, being escorted to the hospital wing. The two prison officers with him were entertaining ...”

“... have had pride of place. For a careful and balanced account of them, there is no finer study than Paul Ginsborg’s Italy and Its Discontents, the work of an English historian in Florence, originally published in Italian, the latest monument to critical admiration of the country by a foreign scholar. Long-standing occupation of office has not been peculiar to ...”

“... were more restrained, looking like European art-house fiction. Congress featured a drawing by Paul Klee. The boy wasn’t fooled: the crazy titles of the two books with ‘tasteful’ covers were enticing enough.‘Will you buy me these?’His grandmother scowled. It was not enough that the boy be bookish: he should be the right kind of bookish. ‘All ...”

“... stresses the personifications as well as the strangeness of the form.’Hegel himself, being a man of his time and place in this way as in so many others so much less attractive, was a huge fan of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, which tell of a young burgher’s adventures among theatre folk, ruined castles, secret societies, as he seeks to find himself ...”

“... generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does. Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when ...”

“... to become the unwitting subjects of medical observation in the notorious Tuskegee experiment; Paul Goodman’s Of One Blood (the phrase is from Acts 17.26), about the abolitionist response to St Paul’s pronouncement that the whole human race has a common origin; Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites, about the origins of ...”

“... that the two opinions are far from mutually exclusive. And there is more: love poems written man to man, of which even the heartbreakingly sane and justly famous ‘To His Love’ can be distanced into possible heterosexuality only by jiggering about with the ‘his’ in its title; a sometimes obsessional liking for ...”

“... could build to more sustained recognitions; as in the intense rendering of the plain faces of a man and a woman: The young man’s eyes had the opal lightings of dark oil and, though he was watching me in a way that relaxed me to cold weakness and ignobility, they fed too strongly inward to draw to a focus: whereas those ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... will recognise that the question of who one is is always dialogical, and stop behaving like the man in Wittgenstein who, when asked how tall he was, responded by placing his hand on top of his head. In Planet of the Apes, the gung-ho American hero arrives at the inconceivably remote planet to find some of the younger apes playing basketball. It’s a bit ...”

“... oneself as a member of a family. There thus appeared two kinds of desire – one for the anonymous man, one for the family man.Let me now say something about what the word ‘solitude’ means. We know three solitudes in society. We know a solitude imposed by power. This is the solitude of isolation, the solitude of ...”

“... it was a servant of the powerful Okurasho, the ‘Treasury Ministry’, just as the Banque de France was a slave of the Ministry of Finance. As such, both were subject to the corrupting influence – dare one say it – of political decisions, though in truth both ministries are ultra-conservative élite strongholds, scarcely exposed to the vagaries of ...”

“... 20 in Scotland, 14 in England, nine in Ireland, three in Wales, and one in the Isle of Man. In the US I have found cards of 16 ‘Meetings of the Waters’, in Canada six, in New South Wales three. Some of these places gave rise to multiple cards: I stopped collecting cards of Avoca at 31, of Killarney at 26, of the Greta and Tees at 15, and so ...”