“... have recognised her Russians, starting with the first one she met, her violin teacher: Maxim wore black turtlenecks, played a mellow-toned, orange-coloured violin, and produced an impression of being deeply absorbed by considerations and calculations beyond the normal range of human cognition. Towards the end of one lesson, for example, he told me that he had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for War, had the affair with Christine Keeler at Ward’s flat. Keeler was also consorting with Eugene Ivanov, the vodka-loving Soviet Naval Attaché, who was having great success in London society and who was also a friend of Ward. Profumo denied the liaison in the House of Commons, admitted it three months later and resigned. Incredible rumours of sex ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had been completely swallowed by the seething purulence. The other, half open, was sinking like a black and ruinous hole.The juxtaposition of the morgue and the dream suggests more stories than we can count. But Zola is careful to note that the ‘great breath of despair’ that follows rises not from the terminal room but from the boulevard of marching ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”