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“... Ezra Pound didn’t say the apparition of those faces in the crowd was like ‘petals on a wet, black bough’, and after a hundred such comparisons, riddling one paragraph after another (‘like bulletholes’, I am tempted to say), the device emerges for what it is: a tic. Similes, however, are perfect for suggesting the dissociative mental state of ...”

“... the shore facing the island of Mona (Anglesey), awed by an opposing army strengthened by women in black waving torches and druidae invoking curses. Roman discipline reasserts itself. The legionaries advance, mowing down any resistance and burning the groves with their bloodstained altars – a scene powerfully recapitulated in George Shipway’s novel of the ...”

“... and tone of the milieu in which Himmler had spent his early twenties in Bavaria. The clerical black garb spoke to the mysticism of a man who had forsaken Catholicism to embrace a raft of esoteric post-Christian fads. In the summer of 1940 he instructed the head of the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage), a research organisation within the SS, to investigate ...”

“... White to White features an aggressively encrusted pale rectangle with a second rectangle – black, white and brown – in its top left corner. Dated 1953, fairly early for such deliberately coarse abstraction, the painting landed in the collection of the famously plain-spoken art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg never published on the relatively ...”

“... of the 20th century. The war radicalised but it also democratised these avant-garde instincts. Black humour was born in the trenches. Oscar Wilde’s clever formulations no longer sufficed. The five-foot-two eyes-of-blue Charleston danced by the ‘It’ generation required a leg position as awkward as the knock-kneed pose of Nijinsky’s corps de ...”

“... sounds like Chandler, the heroine muses in a Woolfian fugue and so on (the veteran translator Michael Henry Heim was in action here). This time, Canongate has reproduced her polyphony of registers by commissioning three translators to work on the different parts of the book and give the memoir, fiction and essay a different feel. Ugrešić studied in ...”

“... into poetry. Not everything is up for grabs. In 2015, Goldsmith performed ‘The Body of Michael Brown’, which took and reordered the official autopsy report of the teenager shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Although he claimed afterwards that his intention had been to expose the rhetorical violence of the report, Goldsmith faced ...”

“... 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 once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a ...”

“... improvising drones to strike land targets deep inside Russia and, at sea, forcing the Russian Black Sea Fleet to retreat, lifting its blockade of Ukrainian ports, which are now exporting grain again. It would have found a previously unimaginable degree of solidarity with Western countries, acquiring billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry, to the point ...”

“... infused with irony and paradox. That he should so heavily and sarcastically miss the point of a black joke is a sorry thing. And note the leaden, ordinary prose. (‘Chain of events’ is a cliché, and you can’t easily have a chain of any sort ‘set in motion’.) Not only is O’Brien being crass here, he is also being reactionary. He sounds like one ...”

“... immigrants from Lithuania and Poland, Hersh grew up in the 1930s and 1940s on the predominantly black South Side of Chicago, where he worked in his parents’ dry-cleaning shop and attended community college at night. His big break came – though he didn’t know it at the time – when an English professor at the college saw his promise and arranged for ...”

“... to look at the series of British actions leading up to the massacre, in particular those of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of the Punjab. Unlike Dyer, O’Dwyer could not be said to be a stupid man; he had a first in jurisprudence from Balliol. But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames ...”

“... else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of her ...”

“... war and peace are questions of life and death. Not the death of some or even many people, but as Michael Walzer proposes in Arguing about War, the ‘moral as well as physical extinction’ of an entire people. True, it is only rarely that a nation will find its ‘ongoingness’ – its ability ‘to carry on, and also to improve on, a way of life handed ...”

“... that he was uncritical: the student corps, with their drunkenness and duelling, he considered ‘black-rotten’, so he firmly told the Master, who apparently had shown a soft spot for them. And he reported that when he translated bits of Jude the Obscure, his Schwerin family were distressed at first because they thought Jude meant ‘Jew’, ‘and a book ...”