“... Thomas Sankara​ , the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, was shot dead in the presidential buildings in Ouagadougou on 15 October 1987. I was the West Africa correspondent at the time for Radio France International and Libération, based in neighbouring Ivory Coast. The day before the assassination I got a call from Sankara ...”

“... Both writers are concerned to stress their fine sensibilities, Reed in a surrealist mode, Kirkup more in the manner of a Nineties aesthete. Reed claims that at the age of 19 he was already living in ‘a blaze of heightened perception’ prompted by drink and drugs. He believes poems are prompted by withheld orgasms, ‘the work on the page ... like the line ...”

“... in the previous history of womankind.’ Opposition came, strangely, from the liberal scientist Thomas Henry Huxley. In reply to a telegram from Herbert Spencer asking support for the burial, Huxley wrote:   It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly opposed, possibly with the raking up of past histories, which had better be ...”

“... is an act of love, the novel itself is an expression of hatred – German self-hatred, which, Thomas Mann said, ‘goes to the point of self-disgust and self-abomination.’ The blurb tells us that the four chief characters in the novel represent the four elements of the German soul : ‘music, bureaucracy, arms and religion’. The story is set in Rome ...”

“... killed off by the war the vacuum was filled by the extravagant romanticism associated with Dylan Thomas, George Barker and Edith Sitwell. Less than a decade later, with those roses seen as over-blown, Robert Conquest was deploring ‘the omission of the necessary intellectual component from poetry’, gathering several disparate writers under one ...”

“... looked like he could manage very well on his own. He edited Seven, an early venue for Dylan Thomas and the New Apocalypse poets, but his real coup had been to get several Wallace Stevens poems published in Britain, much to Stevens’s pleasure. Meanwhile, his own poems kept coming, and by 1944 a Selected, The Glass Tower, came out, expensively ...”

“... is convincing. Fashion wasn’t considered superficial or thought of as a lesser art. As Shade Thomas-Fahm, a Nigerian designer whose work is displayed in the ‘Vanguard’ section of the exhibition, writes: ‘It was the time of Fela, and Wole Soyinka’s plays … It was a time of Nigeria evolving. We were bringing in new ideas … Arts and culture were ...”

“... Kate Moss done up as Ziggy Stardust. The picture is a monument to improbable staying power. It’s more than two decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at ...”

“... Welles’s Touch of Evil.To Murch, who has won three Academy Awards and been nominated for six more, film editing is a sensual ‘full-body’ experience: ‘a kind of dance, a choreography of images and sounds in the flow of time, forged in movement, eventually crystallising into permanence’. This embrace is a kind of erotic surrender to the unique ...”

“... led by such avatars as Alan Everitt, Peter Laslett, J. H. Plumb, Lawrence Stone, Keith Thomas and E. P. Thompson, now constitutes a substantial body of knowledge that has transformed our conception both of British history and of what constitutes legitimate historical inquiry. The modish topics of birth and death, the ...”

“... from his mentally unstable wife. She presided over his household in London and in the country as a more or less acknowledged common law wife. Hackman, who left an elegantly written suicide note and comported himself with dignity throughout, rapidly became a celebrity, too. The night of the murder he had in his pocket a letter that Ray had returned to him ...”

“... error here: Bunter’s age is always 15.) A figment of popular culture, in other words, of no more substance than Desperate Dan. Ah, but Hughes imagines the future author of the Greyfriars stories, in or about 1907, doing the rounds of English public schools in search of characters to insert into his projected schoolboy series, and – having exhausted ...”

“... Norse myths are probably more familiar than classical ones in the modern world, perhaps even more familiar than the Old Testament stories Europeans were once brought up on. That is remarkable when one considers the almost vanished literature on which our knowledge of the myths is based ...”

“... world famous, yet ultimately human enough for their allied Anglo-Tibetan opponents to outwit them. Thomas Goodfellowe MP, fictional hero as battered old teddy bear, is due for another outing this autumn, says the blurb. By then, where will our real-life hero, the Dalai Lama, be? Thomas Carlyle was wrong, on the whole, about ...”

“... of dividedness, where the ‘self’ that is doing the criticising or restraining is in some sense more sophisticated or more knowing, as well as more in command, than the ‘self’ that is being criticised or restrained. But when we talk about being ‘self-revealing’ or ...”