“... an auctioneer, and Evelyn, a seamstress turned dress-shop owner. Evelyn was Irish; Albert a former Black and Tan. Carman despised his father and doted on his perfectionist mother, who thought the world of him. They shared an obsession with cleanliness and most of all with success. In response to sustained pressure from Evelyn to come first in everything he ...”

“... father. Eventually the family settled in Florence, largely because Lee’s half-brother, the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton, was struck by paralysis in 1873, and became bed-bound. A measure of stability was good for the teenage Lee, and she soon saw Italy as her home. She was precociously learned and astonishingly productive, publishing over her lifetime a stream ...”

“... the chapter on the military operation itself by two retired (and liberal) American Rear-Admirals, Eugene Carroll and Gene La Rocque, of the Washington Centre for Defence Information, and the brilliant summary of ‘Iraqi Political Dynamics’ by Faleh’ Abd Al-Jabar. There is also a most moving evocation, in various Arab voices, orchestrated by Fadia ...”

“... home town): And one of them put his blade into the earth To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami, And scattered the dirt, and spat, Turning away abruptly, out of respect. Justice was not prolific; like Elizabeth Bishop, with whom he has much in common, he devoted his life to the perfection of a small body of deceptively modest poems. His ...”

“... are less immediate, more American. He sees a picture of Fanon on the back jacket of his father’s Black Skin, White Masks. Black face, tweed jacket, striped tie. On the family bookshelves Fanon keeps company with The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Some years later he reviews Macey’s biography for the New York Times. In 2002 ...”

“... volunteer was a 20-year-old woman wearing white jeans and a white tank top who had two parallel black pen marks running up and down her nose. She told me she’d dropped out of college and come to New York looking for a ‘fashion industry internship’. She was from a small town in California. She kept losing track of what she was talking about as people ...”

“... white-haired Jew … The fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess … An old Jew in a tall black skull cap … a big burly Jew with a Hitler moustache … He had just grinned at me with his wise Jew face … a group of negroes chanted and chattered … Heads turned slowly and the eyes in them glistened and stared in the dead alien silence of another ...”

“... a more active part in chivalry’s rituals: Dr Keen has a nice story of the ‘vamping’ of the Black Prince by Joan of Kent and he emphasises that Lancelot was instructed in the mysteries of knighthood by the Lady of the Lake: ‘a great lady of regal family and endowed with magical powers, but not a priest’. The mysteries of knighthood and woman fused ...”

“... and only the desk and the doorman are visible from my comfortable armchair. I then smoke my long black cigar in peace, in the dark: once a primeval bonfire in the clear of the forest, now a civilised ember glowing in the night like a beacon to the soul.’ All the same, he knows that rhapsody does not make a good read. Nor does connoisseurship or dogma, and ...”

“... such as Richard Rorty, Benedict Anderson and the radical-turned-Neo-Conservative historian Eugene Genovese, as well as thoughtful reviews of significant debates, such as the contested legacy of Darwin (Stephen Jay Gould v. sociobiology), the stake of revisionist histories of the 1960s and the role of race in the formulation of law. But at times one ...”

“... guard. He has taken some serious punishment as a gambler. And his relationship with Yasmin, a black jazz singer, has broken up, cutting him off from his four-year-old daughter. If the characters in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting are ‘failures in a country ay failures’, Jerry Brown falls short in the heartland of success: ‘failed husband and failed ...”

“... up quickly – ‘The House Beautiful is the play lousy’ – while those she admired, such as Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, made her coy: ‘One is ashamed to place neat little bouquets of praise on this mighty conception.’ On the whole, she preferred ‘little, bitter twists of line and incident’ to ‘any amount of connected story’ and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sante calls this ‘an aggressive silence, as charged, dense and reverberating as Malevich’s black canvas. It affirms that all writing is compromise, that conception will always trump execution, that ego and politics are everyone’s co-authors. It may be rooted in despair but it grows in the direction of transcendence. It wishes to free poetry from ...”

“... noble marble monument’ bearing a record of his deeds. His cousin, Jacopo Pesaro, who chose black rather than scarlet and became bishop of Paphos, commanded the Papal fleet in the same campaign as Benedetto, and commissioned two paintings from Titian to commemorate the victory, for which he felt he had never been given the credit which was his due. Thus ...”