“... else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of her ...”

“... infused with irony and paradox. That he should so heavily and sarcastically miss the point of a black joke is a sorry thing. And note the leaden, ordinary prose. (‘Chain of events’ is a cliché, and you can’t easily have a chain of any sort ‘set in motion’.) Not only is O’Brien being crass here, he is also being reactionary. He sounds like one ...”

“... it in economy is infra dig: ‘It’s not the food, it’s the sort of people.’ Another Tory, Michael Mates, spells it out: ‘He doesn’t want to meet his constituents.’ Coverage of Mullin during the expenses hoo-ha dwelt on his black-and-white telly, when other members were blagging plasma screens the size of ...”

“... next volume like crack,’ Zadie Smith writes. As the literary critic – and former junkie – Michael Clune has pointed out, we tend to reach for drug metaphors when we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality ...”

“... the tide of reverent reassessment did eventually march forwards through the text between the Bible-black covers. Some 19th-century scholars like Ferdinand Christian Baur of the University of Tübingen were radical in their hatchet jobs on authenticity: Baur contended that of all the Epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament, the apostle had written only ...”

“... The man awoke to find himself healed, but for the rest of his life, he had one white leg and one black. Not all miracles healed. The saints could also liberate prisoners, bring rain or fair weather, give children to the barren and bring about victory in combat or in court. But when scorned, they wrought ferocious miracles of punishment. Saints not only ...”

“... editions of the Pevsner Suffolk guide. Once slim, pocketable and beige, the volumes are now black, thick, and less handy. This may be the last print edition of the series. A digital version would expand the guides’ uses: and if you don’t have the right sort of imagination to visualise interiors or exteriors from written detail alone – I struggle ...”

“... through the categories that define who they are, whereas, as Srinivasan notes, for a woman or a black person in the United States, it may be quite the opposite. As James Baldwin said in 1961, ‘to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.’ This seems to be the line of argument implicit in Mishra’s ...”

“... to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. He would like to have written Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Threaded into each of his plays is a coded tribute: an MP in Dirty Linen, a clerk in The Invention of Love and two characters in Leopoldstadt are all called Chamberlain, doffing their caps to Stoppard’s long-term assistant, Jacky ...”

“... volume of poetry, War’s Embers, appeared in 1919.Gurney’s previous biographer, the composer Michael Hurd, believed his subject’s truest vocation was music and that the songs are a greater achievement than the poetry. Trevor Hold, also a composer, disagreed, arguing that Gurney’s poetry is ‘more original than [the] music’. I am on Hold’s ...”

“... North Korea, indicated that he was ending Moscow’s military pact with Pyongyang and returned the black box (apparently minus a few tapes) from KAL007. In spite of its spectacular successes, South Korea is not West Germany, either politically or economically. Southern society is incomparably stronger than that of the North. It is vibrant, well-educated and ...”

“... of his mother’s role in his father’s life: ‘Her whole beauty consists in two little black eyes and a pretty figure. She has no wit, but she has common sense enough to enable her to fulfil her duties as wife and mother. It is a downright lie that she is inclined to extravagance ... Tell me whether I could wish myself a better wife? ’ After ...”

“... pretty coarse at the arts of primitive accumulation), the promotions of Charles Keating (S&Ls) and Michael Milken, high priest of the junk bond, now facing ten years in the Federal penitentiary. There’s rarely been a city harder to ‘see’, through a windscreen caked with the alternative myths of the boosters and the noirs, nor one about whose history and ...”

“... that he was uncritical: the student corps, with their drunkenness and duelling, he considered ‘black-rotten’, so he firmly told the Master, who apparently had shown a soft spot for them. And he reported that when he translated bits of Jude the Obscure, his Schwerin family were distressed at first because they thought Jude meant ‘Jew’, ‘and a book ...”

“... the port and nuts (before the brandy stage): Thou who when cares attack, bidst them avaunt and black Care from the horseman’s back, vaulting unseatest. Sweet when blah blah in clay, sweet when they’ve cleared away Lunch and at close of day, Possibly sweetest. Calverley goes on to heap scorn on those who impugn the habit, ridiculing the notion that it ...”