“... shoulders fearfully. No cars or cabs, but police are everywhere. In the distance I see a huge black blob disfiguring the sky. Maybe a thunderstorm’s brewing? I step in front of a fleeing office worker: ‘Excuse me, but has something happened?’ His answer comes out as barely comprehensible comic-book babble: ‘The World Trade Center has been hit ...”

“... are too derivative, but recognisably Auster. In the second play, the characters, called Green, Black and Blue, pre-empt the Blue, Black, Brown and White of his Ghosts, the second volume of the NY Trilogy, itself far in advance of the sinister rainbow alliance in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. In the third play, the Auster ...”

“... Benjamins’, in the words of the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar ($100 bills have a picture of Benjamin Franklin), the old guard is much better funded. But the younger, dissenting wing of the party is more energetic, and closer to the base: of the Democrats running for president, only Cory Booker, a senator from New Jersey, spoke at the most recent ...”

“... to light on a good read for the plane, his eye is assaulted by a thwacking array of swastikas on black, gold and blood-red fields. Approaching them at random but with a certain circumspection, he finds, for example, Philippe van Rindt’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler, in which it is revealed that Hitler survived his attempts at suicide in the bunker; The Murder ...”

“... truth about a father who turns out to have been a maritally entangled commercial traveller and the black sheep of a respectable Glasgow family. Bundling up her infant, Janet withdrew from Blairgowrie to the Spittal of Glenshee, where she rented a cottage. Neat treats this as a passage between opposed cultures and inheritances: from mean-spirited middle-class ...”

“... Trump’s resounding success later that year takes the same granular approach to show Hispanic and Black votes falling away from the Democratic Party, whose ‘triumph at the scale of 1992 or 2008 – never mind 1936 or 1964 – is no longer conceivable’. In general, though, NLR is immune to the appeal of actually existing electoral democracy and sceptical ...”

“... make it seem as if it had been intentional.’ (Anna Karenina) ‘He pulled down over his eyes a black straw hat the brim of which he extended with his hand held out over it like an eye-shade, as though to see whether someone was coming at last, made the perfunctory gesture of annoyance by which people mean to show that they have waited long enough, although ...”

“... nearly every mention of knife crime in the rest of the national press was in connection with young Black people in London.According to Home Office data, almost half of all homicides in England and Wales are ‘drug-related’, but this is a very broad definition: recent analysis by Vice News found that it includes incidents in which those involved had been ...”

“... appearing again and again as touchstones, and he was cautionary in response to his friend Walter Benjamin’s views on the utopian potential to be found in cinema, radio and advertising. In a letter he wrote to Benjamin in August 1936, Adorno defines his own position as being where the extremes of art – the very ...”

“... How to be black in America was the challenge for spirited young men of colour who found their way to Harlem in the troubled years of the 1940s, when music, poetry, dance and art were giving way to drink, drugs, street crime and sex for money. Malcolm Little’s first impulse was to cut loose in the big city where he found himself soon after his 17th birthday in 1942 ...”

“... throughout A la recherche), engages the nature of his prose as well as his sentiments; as Walter Benjamin said, in one of the finest essays ever written on the novel, Proust’s language is inseparable from his ‘intransigent French spirit’. It is a language with roots reaching deep into the history of French prose from Montaigne through Saint-Simon and ...”

“... by Brahms, but it looks forward as well as back: add a French horn and it could almost be part of Benjamin Britten’s Serenade (1943), his cycle on night and dreams.With Five Elizabethan Songs Gurney felt he was knocking on the door of mastery. ‘Blister my kidneys,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘if the music is not as English, as joyful, as tender as any ...”

“... editions of the Pevsner Suffolk guide. Once slim, pocketable and beige, the volumes are now black, thick, and less handy. This may be the last print edition of the series. A digital version would expand the guides’ uses: and if you don’t have the right sort of imagination to visualise interiors or exteriors from written detail alone – I struggle ...”

“... he evidently never wore a wig – dressed in what appears to be his customary suit of solemn black, but with a plain, reddish-brown greatcoat. As Einberg puts it, he ‘eschews any aggrandisement of his own person, either by conventional gesture or dress’. There is, to borrow Hallett’s terms again, a striking combination of benevolence and especially ...”

“... to prevailing conventions took courage. In Boston, Daniell and Nicol became involved with Benjamin Tucker, an outspoken supporter of women’s emancipation and an ‘individualist anarchist’ (he argued for private property rather than common ownership). Daniell contributed stories and poems to his journal, Liberty; according to Rowbotham, the ...”