“... distinguished’ Cresset Press. She met her future business partner, Clive Allison, at a party in West London in 1965. The two decided there and then to start a publishing house. They hired an office space occupied during the day by Martin Eve’s left-wing Merlin Press (the publisher of E.P. Thompson, Georg Lukacs and the Socialist Register). In the ...”

“... and figuratively, lesbianism remains, even in the great rainbow-flag-waving cities of the West. Some of the smartest and most well-meaning straight people still don’t get it – in fact, don’t even see it. This mole-blindness is all the more bizarre given the unremittingly vulgar sexual explicitness that otherwise assaults us everywhere in the ...”

“... in remembrance of the children who died in the sinking: a wreath was to be laid, outside the west doorway, at the Memorial to all Innocent Victims of Oppression, Violence and War, and then dropped at sea at the site of the sinking. I may have missed something, but the wreath-laying seemed to take place almost unnoticed behind a press of tourists, without ...”

“... birds and persons that have made him famous in camera history as a founding father of the movies. Rebecca Solnit’s striking introductory photograph shows what she wants us to see in Muybridge’s own pictures, and in him. Her subject is not just his life, but the unstable creative intensity of his relation to his world: the Wild ...”

“... in the region, there’s a tiny sign for Grand Bayou and you turn off onto a dirt road running west. When I did, a beat-up truck passing in the other direction paused, and the dark-skinned driver rolled down his window to say that the party we were looking for was standing by the road just up ahead. Apparently not a lot of people come down that road.The ...”

“... graded on a four-point scale, ranging from the ‘A’ accorded to the Braamfontein, Brixton and West Park Cemeteries, which meet the needs of the predominantly affluent white northern suburbs of the city, to ‘D’ – the status for cemeteries that service African townships such as Alexandra and Soweto, to the north and south of the city. Cemeteries ...”

“... to their number … lays a particular obligation on the biographer to make his purpose plain.’ Rebecca Fraser justified her Life on the basis that the twenty years since Gérin’s had brought much material to light. ‘Yet another biography,’ Barker writes in The Brontës, ‘requires an apology, or at least an explanation.’ Harman doesn’t justify ...”

“... a kind of thoughtless grace.’ He was ‘physically powerful and fearless’. On drives into the West they took acid. Then there was the work of the ranch: bailing hay, corralling cattle, dropping explosives into mile-deep gas wells and flying Barlow’s plane. Barlow recognised the way John affected people. A college friend of John’s said: ‘I have never ...”

“... friends of his youth, moving about the world, more urgently alive than the Canadians of the 1970s. Rebecca, the only survivor of a family of Jewish sisters, went to Israel. Prema, once an anti-Nazi saboteur, went to Australia but returned to Czechoslovakia in 1968 (just missing Smiricky on his way out) and wrote to him from their hometown, giving the news ...”

“... things like ‘We are all one’ and ‘Let us create’): but he is not what Jason calls a ‘West-Endy philistine’, because conscious that ‘it was easy to make fun of Jason – he committed himself, while others made ambiguous remarks tainted with cynicism.’ ‘Fun’ is made, but there’s also a graver pity at the paucity of Jason’s inner ...”

“... words, drags the ‘weight of chains of centuries’. The British colonial regime in the West Indies began with the occupation of Barbados in 1605, six years before The Tempest was written. Marina Warner’s magnificent new novel portrays an imaginary Caribbean island both at the time of first contact with the British early in the 17th century, and ...”

“... ancestor of the Neanderthals and ourselves; Homo neanderthalensis, found in Europe and South-West Asia, which appears so biologically similar and yet so culturally different from ourselves; and finally Homo sapiens. He charts the advances in our understanding of the fossil, archaeological and genetic evidence in turn, before bringing all the evidence ...”

“... futile effort to make ourselves – to make the world – clean. ‘The dark hole in the floor,’ Rebecca West observed of a toilet in old Serbia on her extraordinary 1930s journey through Yugoslavia, ‘made it seem as if dung, having been expelled by man, had set itself up as a new and hostile and magically powerful element that could cover the whole ...”

“... Russell (he later wrote the first Parker biography, published in 1973), detail a period on the West Coast in 1946 which produced agonies in Parker’s life and a series of lustrous recordings. I still remember the several oily scenes Russell conjures up. Parker suffering acute heroin withdrawal in an airless LA garage: a metal cot, no heating, his thin ...”

“... a key to Meredith, which makes him something like the Shelley of ‘Mont Blanc’ or ‘Ode to the West Wind’, except that a mountain or a wind in Shelley is always more than just a mountain or a wind – it is an embodiment of Power, the spirit of revolution, a dream of historical inevitability – and Meredith’s lark is just a lark, which of course is ...”