“... a man who is thinking of leaving Alexandria to seek out a new post in the provinces under King Artaxerxes. Against the success he hopes to achieve, the fugitive from Alexander is reminded that You’re longing for something else, aching for other things: praise from the Demos and the Sophists, that hard-won, that priceless acclaim – the Agora, the ...”

“... cruelties soon to be visited on the occupied Netherlands by his son Philip, whom he had just made King of Spain, and to whom he now entrusted them.Kunzle sees one of Pieter Brueghel’s versions of the Massacre of the Innocents as an expression of political protest specifically against Philip’s military tyranny in the Netherlands, and even more specifically ...”

“... been swinging them,’ before shifting to ‘You’d think … You may see,’ and ending with a pearl of wisdom: ‘One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.’ The movement from ‘I’ to ‘you’ to ‘one’ feels a little too cosy or coddling, as though the one thing needful were for the experience to be converted into a form of knowledge. The ...”

“... be treated like the native human populations, they ask to be regarded as beasts belonging to the King, feeling sure that he treats his animals better than his human subjects. So the immediate question, are they men or not? acquires some political urgency. This is where their breeding season becomes important. Haffenden quotes a long unposted letter to ...”

“... Before rushing to judgment she should have recalled the US treatment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. As an example of Arab ill-treatment of Jews, Peters mentions Nasser’s hanging of two Egyptian Jews as Zionist spies and suggests that the trial was a frame-up. Apparently she has managed not to hear of the ‘Lavon affair’, in which the Israeli ...”

“... themselves from the prison of race when in fact they still couldn’t see beyond its walls. After Pearl Harbour, he wrote, wartime Los Angeles seethed with a ‘tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the street as gas fumes’, and no one was above the fray. Himes captured the atmosphere better than anyone in his LA novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go and ...”

“... to see its appeal. Eraserhead might have vanished if it hadn’t been for Ben Barenholtz, the king of New York’s midnight movie scene, who had also popularised Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘acid Western’ El Topo and John Waters’s ‘filth epic’ Pink Flamingos. Waters – a direct contemporary but no eagle scout – was another early ...”

“... kept flying back to the US.In September 1997, she performed pieces from her last novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, with music from the Mekons at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. During the final performance she collapsed. She got herself to San Francisco, where she booked a room in a Travelodge and phoned Glück, and then Viegener. A hospital ...”

“... murkier parts of Kings Cross and the old un-reconstructed Docklands appeal, then Grytviken is a pearl of desolation. A rust-bucket ghost town, left to rot in its own beautiful way.We were greeted by a ruddy-faced Englishman in a fisherman’s sweater and his hearty wife, though my attention was gripped by the surreal sight of three soldiers in camouflage ...”