“... and about the sniffiness with which he was viewed by the small, determinedly self-improving black middle class, which wasn’t at first thrilled by the outside world’s interest in some ‘damn nasty Rasta’, all ‘ganja smell and frowsy arm’, as an angry mother puts it. Other characters do impressions of foreign music-business types – ‘You ...”

“... notably the groups Disabled People Against Cuts, the Mental Health Resistance Network and Black Triangle.Pring’s book memorialises some of the lives lost. On a university visit, Stephen Carré buys ‘a large, beautiful bear’ for his older sister. Aged seven, Jodey Whiting brings a stray goat back to her grandmother’s house, insisting she wants ...”

“... his brethren’ – and this text was used by Early Modern Europeans to justify the translation of black Africans into the doleful state of chattel slavery. I can’t remember anyone in the whole Shakespearean oeuvre who shows any zest for physical labour except the gravedigger in Hamlet. The Bard’s own works, however, have been regarded with almost the ...”

“... musicians. There were talented singers in his social circle, notably the opera singer Johann Michael Vogl, but Schubert would often sing and play his songs himself. He had a nice voice and was a good pianist, but one wonders what these renditions must have sounded like. The technical demands of the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise were ...”

“... the wind at the top of a pole. And on the day I came, there were many plums rotting on the trees.Michael Fordham, the farm’s owner, was driving a new JCB in and out of one of the barns, lifting grain into a waiting lorry. The farm where we stood was 290 acres in all. ‘But we run a further 700 acres from here,’ ...”

“... in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James (1986); Michael Anesko in ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986); Rayburn Moore in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse (1988); and Lyall Powers in Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 (1990). There’s ...”

“... central traditions of British political life, by contrast, such as the state-encrusted flummery of Black Rod, the Mace and the Queen’s Speech, are quite dead: the rows about the handling of the sacred Mace are really to do with the blasphemous disturbance of a corpse.Eugen Weber amends Marx to say that when revolution repeats itself, it becomes not tragedy ...”

“... secure, if not absolutely so – I write as one missed by the last census. But what about the ‘black economy’? There is a known world of tax evasion, moonlighting, jobs held, particularly by married women, without the official paperwork and payments, legal and illegal fringe benefits, and, at the bottom end, transactions in kind. We do not know if this ...”

“... with the Church of England, Coptic and Ethiopian, Polish (with a figure of the redoubtable Black Madonna of Czestochowa) and Old Catholic. The Old Catholics are pretty well spread about the world. During the last war they were helpful to Anglicans in Java and even in Nazi Germany: their Dutch and Swiss congregations support an Anglican diocese in South ...”

“... at the back of his house. Purple summer dark, stars, streetlights climbing Divis, or the Black Mountain, as it’s called. We stare out at the mountain and drink glasses of Powers. Now and then there’s a silence, pause, a moment of contemplation, a gap. It’s like being inside a double bowl – the glass dome, then the city ringed by hills. A line ...”

“... whose thongs show above the back of their low-rise jeans (‘God, what a stupid fashion’) and black boys with ‘heads shaved into cryptic sigils, getting on and off in obedience to the invisible frontiers of their postcode wars’. Her favourite place on a bus has always been at the front of the top deck, enjoying ‘that stilt-walker’s sway, that ...”

“... as a painter and draughtsman against Reynolds or Fuseli or even his older contemporary Goya. (The Black Paintings and The Book of Urizen seem to me to inhabit comparable worlds.) But Blake himself, we know, would have understood and sympathised immediately with Bloom’s terms, if not his opinions, and regarded the scholars’ stony faces as just the latest ...”

“... Camille. Posed against a red curtain on a canvas more than seven feet high, a woman in a green and black striped gown and a black jacket trimmed with fur stands with her back angled towards the viewer, her face partly visible as she turns her head over her shoulder and raises one gloved hand in a gesture both elegant and ...”

“... puritans as they do Vikings. There’s an example on my pinboard. A behatted man, buttoned up in black, admires his wife’s sampler, which reads: ‘Way to Go, God.’ ‘Nice sentiment, Martha,’ he beams. Martha wears the same gloomy sub fusc, with black bonnet and broad linen collar. Putting slang in puritan mouths is ...”

“... was handled: foul-smelling industries, the manufacture of ordnance, brewing, confectionery, black smoke palls and sickly-sweet perfumes. The cloacal mud of low tide mingled deliriously with sulphurous residues trapped in savage greenery: the bindweed, thorns and dark berries of the riverside path. The peninsula thrives on secrecy. For as long as anyone ...”