“... Harris says ‘has the kick of the proverbial country mule and becomes western Africa’s form of white lightning’. As well as using palm oil in cooking, Africans use it as an ointment, a medicine, a soap and as lamp oil. This red palm oil was known in England in the 17th century, where it was used to rub on chilblains and swollen limbs.It was the candle ...”

“... with any aspect of foreign policy … I can confirm that there have never been, whether in White House talks, in telegrams, in ambassadorial approaches, or even on the hot line, any attempts to link Vietnam with economic or monetary co-operation. In a cabinet meeting in February 1966 Wilson again denied the link, and ...”

“... skin outside Gooey Jew. From the 20th century’s 24/7 chimneys, choo-choo- Train puffs of white smoke rise. The trains waddle full of cattle to the camps. The weightless puffs of smoke are on their way to the sky. Ovens cremate fields of human cow. Ovens cremate fields of human snow. One has to go back to Sylvia Plath, born just a few years before ...”

“... have been major investigations in Scotland (the Calman Commission of 2007-8) and Wales – the Richard Commission (2002-4), the Holtham Commission (2007-10) and the Silk Commission (2011-14) – into the broader operation of devolution and the funding mechanisms that support it. Anxiety has focused not only on relations between Westminster and the ...”

“... why ‘swallow equals anchor’: ‘the likeness is not wholly gratuitous since cloud also equals white ship, or sailing ship – allowing a coherent image. But, anchor equals stability and moorings, and swallow is equally an image of the swift and fleeting – as cloud is an image of the drifting, dissolving, and passing, of all things.’ Finlay is not much ...”

“... excess. His friend the racial theorist, eugenicist and future ill-fated minister of agriculture Richard Walther Darré wrote Race: The New Nobility of the Blood and the Soil at his estate near Jena. Both belonged to the primitive, woodworking, neo-peasant, maypole-hugging ideological left of the NSDAP, in which broad church they were about as distant from ...”

“... she was asked if she knew the difference between right and wrong. ‘No. Nothing is ever black or white to me, at all.’ After which Dunn asks: ‘But do you have any kind of definite moral code? Like for instance you shouldn’t sleep with married men?’ ‘Not at all, no,’ Quin replies. ‘I feel that if you feel this complete recognition, then I ...”

“... him and her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. Much later, as queen of England, she represented her son Richard I while he was on the Third Crusade. At a humbler rank, the Cistercian monk Thomas of Froidmont wrote a Life of his heroic sister, Margaret of Beverley. Having gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1187 while Saladin was besieging the city, Margaret assisted ...”

“... proportionately, as in the European armies and I found myself remembering from The Last Enemy Richard Hillary’s friend Noel Agazarian, shot down in his Spitfire in 1940. The death in action of already well-known writers like Charles Péguy and Alain-Fournier seems like an accident: it is the younger ones who have the besoin de la fatalité, and are ...”

“... Marcel Raymond, and then soon after, of Georges Poulet, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Starobinski and Gaston Bachelard, I am reminded of a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Marcel Raymond I read first in the English translation, published in 1950, of De Baudelaire au Surréalisme. It became immediately a precious book for ...”

“... even the pieces that fall far short of the best, with professional respect. He speaks well of The White Peacock, applauding its restraint, and pointing out that it lacks the usual characteristics of a first novel, which Lawrence held back until his third, Sons and Lovers. On the second, The Trespasser, he is jolly and censorious, disliking its refinement and ...”

“... were on amicable terms with a number of the age’s luminaries, from the Duchess of Marlborough to Richard Steele and Alexander Pope. At the age of 18, Cleland arrived in Bombay in the service of the East India Company, where his skill at writing and talent for languages smoothed his progress from foot soldier to attorney, and from there to secretary of the ...”

“... There have been claims that the shape and size of the corpus callosum – the broad tract of white matter that connects the two hemispheres – differs between the sexes, but they have been vigorously contested. Even if such differences could be unequivocally substantiated no one has the slightest idea what their implications might be for the allegedly ...”

“... other ex-communists, also contributed to The God That Failed, a 1949 book edited by the Labour MP Richard Crossman. He went on to foster a series of CIA-funded seminars, populated by Encounter contributors, in the Austrian ski resort of Alpbach.Koestler’s adventurous past in the Spanish Civil War, along with his explorations of cosmology (The ...”

“... in a movie, there is a black spread of pages, a charcoal grey spread, a dove grey spread, then a white page with a black border: ‘Biography of X by C.M. Lucca’. The conceit of the novel is that it is a fictional biography, with fake footnotes, but real endnotes that reveal the sources Lacey used to create X, her wife and the world she lived in. There are ...”