“... the novels are divided into two parts, of around eight chapters each, with chiming subtitles: ‘Black Swans/White Whales’, ‘False Friends/True Enemies’, ‘Something like the Sun/Nothing like the Rain’. Part One begins with an imaginary visitor or observer – someone sitting on the top deck of a bus stuck in traffic on the street outside; a cat; a ...”

“... of 1947 Erhard abolished rationing and freed all prices: rent control was abandoned later. The black market collapsed, and goods returned to the shops. At first hardly anyone could afford to buy them, and Erhard survived a vote of confidence by only one vote. But he served an imperturbable leader. Adenauer might despise socialism but he was influenced by ...”

“... cycles of boom and bust. One variant goes: ‘In America, the harvest was underway. As usual, Black people picked cotton, kerchiefs on their heads. As usual, the farmers in Canada harvested wheat. The cotton was gathered into great bundles and sent off on ships; the wheat was gathered in large silos and sent off on ships. The harvest was meagre. Prices ...”

“... Second World War; purchases resumed in 1941, in New York, with André Breton, Howard Putzel and Max Ernst also advising. The catalogue of Guggenheim’s collection, Art of This Century, published in that year, amounted to an ‘anthology of modern art’ – that is, a sourcebook of approved models of thirty years of European avant-garde art. At the end of ...”

“... William Heinemann, who eventually published it, initially objected that Victoria, dome-shaped in black with a white feathered bonnet, looked like a tea cosy. By 1897 the ‘Good Queen and Empress’, a fixture in the mind’s eye of three generations, did look like a tea cosy and was as reassuringly familiar. The print struck the balance between respect and ...”

“...  6 January. The alterations we have been having done are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and from New Zealand who has supervised it all. Walking round the job this evening R. is shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath a crudely made wooden cross ...”

“... up in the gigantic rout as German resistance collapses. He is captured, and shipped across the Black Sea to begin years of forced labour in the Caucasus. Confusingly, the ‘Bolshevists’ don’t immediately kill or torture their prisoners. Although the captured soldiers are kept cold and hungry, the Soviet camp authorities regard them as misled but ...”

“... but there are also some reasonably honest witnesses. These include the stiff-backed statesman whom Max Beerbohm called ‘Britannia’s butler’, two twin widows on a Gospel quest, a get-rich-quick bride in Amazonia, a caustic spinster in India, a writer of fairy-tales, a future poet laureate teamed with a leading delineator of bosoms and bums, and a ...”

“... a distance, watching this outrageous fraud play the invisible bushman, the adept with knives, the black-faced assassin.’ ‘My own intention,’ he explains of his time in the Mekong Delta, ‘was to live not as a Vietnamese among Vietnamese but as an American among Vietnamese’, a position which leaves him feeling ...”

“... There was a lot of racial tension around bebop. Black men were going with fine, rich white bitches. They were all over these niggers out in public and the niggers were clean as a motherfucker and talking all kind of hip shit. Trane liked to ask all these motherfucking questions back then about what he should or shouldn’t play ...”

“... we spent many hours in the crepuscular half-darkness of the studio on East 69th Street looking at black on grey pictures with Rothko ... through those long spells of looking, accompanied by long silences, our opinions were solicited with a deceptive humility. Newly evicted from the paintings, Rothko shared the spectator’s puzzlement: what are these ...”

“... from January 1924 arranges photographs of the young André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and others in a grid around a mugshot of an even more youthful Germaine Berton, an anarchist who assassinated Marius Plateau, editor of the ultra-nationalist Action française. With titles like ‘Open the Prisons, Disband the Army’, the early ...”

“... like me).’ Beardsley, who died at 25, passed his brief life in the fin-de-siècle milieu of Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde. Like them, he was his own artefact. Immensely thin and hollow-eyed with long fingers and a large nose, he seemed to the actress Elizabeth Robins, who met him at a lunch party, to be merely the ‘uncertain ghost of Oscar’. Tate ...”

“... by those in the exhibition, invite attention rather than grab it. The 1903 full-length portrait of Max Beerbohm, his eyes cast down, offers no glance for the viewer to catch; the Breton Girl (1907) and Marie (1910) turn from you, even their profiles half lost; the face of Sybil Hart-Davis lying on a bed (she was, the catalogue tells us, an ‘acknowledged ...”

“... The title​ of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism is misleading. Shelving it under ‘Marxism’ never seems right for a book that questions the compatibility of Black radicalism and Marxist politics, as well as considering aspects of history, sociology and political theory. Robinson’s reluctance to be classified hasn’t always worked in his favour ...”