“... Aristide’s departure was at best facilitated, at worst coerced by the US and France,’ Gayle Smith, a member of the National Security Council staff under Clinton, recently said. Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ...”

“... to allow bitterness to linger. Two of the poem’s other translators, Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, describe its ‘exquisitely subtle blend of ferocity and tenderness’. ‘Let my heart preserve me from all hate,’ the narrator intones. He also draws back from some of the more celebratory aspects of racial self-pride, laughing at his own ‘former ...”

“... she was gone: ‘She’s all we lived for.’ Before she met Elvis’s father, she was Gladys Love Smith. Her mother was Octavia Luvenia Mansell, her great-grandmother was a Cherokee, Morning White Dove. These were stoical and wilful women; whereas the Presley men were not what you’d call an unmixed blessing. Elvis’s great-grandfather, Dunnan Presley ...”

“... of internecine Christian theological dispute. All this, one might expect from the cofounder (with Roger Scruton) of the Conservative Philosophy Group. But Casey is not only conservative (and, besides, presents the interesting spectacle of a man who has been getting steadily less conservative with age). He was educated at a provincial English grammar school by ...”

“... her 1991 American edition for the 1992 British edition. This version, with a Preface by Joan Smith, includes information regarding the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. Marilyn French deals with Southern and Eastern countries, including the ‘Third World’ – a term which she thinks passé and dishonest. Both books are contemporary and ...”

“... want an audience that got it wrong. Who would want that? You might as well become a pop singer, or Roger McGough. My feeling was that we had something to protect. I’ve lately come to think that there are these two types of literary intelligence: the protective, the kind which safeguards art against a vulgarising audience, and the kind that takes art to an ...”

“... of murdering Lynette White on the basis of a false confession – and that his defence team, Roger Thorn and Robin Patton, were bold enough to challenge the admissibility of his confession. It was left to them to get Heron safely out of Leeds Crown Court. A decoy police van was used to divert the attention of the angry crowd, while Patton put Heron in ...”

“... is of interest also. Without checking, I can think of Marx’s open indebtedness to Hegel, to Adam Smith, to the ‘Blue Books’ of the Victorian factory inspectorate, to Balzac and to Charles Darwin. In other words, Berlin was being vulgar when it must decently be presumed that he knew better. Of his other subjects, not even Joseph de Maistre receives such ...”

“... in 1958 after the Notting Hill race riots (source: ITN).I kept returning to a photograph of Roger Mayne’s entitled Latimer Road, North Kensington, 1957. Two black men walk towards the camera, elegant and wary, carrying their anger before them. The white people around them are oblivious to their passing; the black men wear hats, one of them carries a ...”