“... Story). He spent some of his senior year at the Sorbonne, met Hannah Arendt and travelled to the Black Forest with her letter of introduction to meet Martin Heidegger (Malick’s translation of The Essence of Reasons was published a few years later). After graduating in 1965 he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, but didn’t like the cold and damp, and ...”

“... explained in a column for the South African Mail and Guardian, of turning him into ‘an Angry Black Man’. He describes a party in New York that Kapuściński, in town for a PEN conference, was supposed to attend where he waited for the chance to confront him. When Kapuściński failed to arrive, Wainaina downed a consolation martini and approached ...”

“... it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of ...”

“... to this London post-punk scene of an international idea of what an avant-garde might be,’ Michael Bracewell explained to Kraus. Acker explored the roots of her own subculture, and the roots of those roots too: Burroughs took her to Genet, who took her to the French and anti-French traditions, both homegrown and that of the anti-colonial ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”

“... hand, were the crowning glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster reproduced in Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton’s collection shows the great hulk of the ship, sunlit, belching smoke out of three of its four funnels – the fourth was there only for effect – and cutting a swathe between a small sailing ship and a three-masted square ...”

“... a Russian prison yard, one hand in his pocket, carefully framed by the camera in a horseshoe of black-uniformed convicts hundreds strong, offering them redemption or death if they sign up to join the assault on Ukraine. ‘The first sin is deserting,’ he declares. ‘No one falls back. No one retreats. No one surrenders.’ In clip after clip, he accuses ...”

“... not have been accepted as an improvement on ‘poetry’. Apart from garbled rumours about an all-black Macbeth in Harlem, and a documentary version of Wells’s War of the Worlds which panicked the US Eastern seaboard, this film was all we knew of him, and it hit us out of the blue. But even then, I recall my friends and I detecting a whiff of the brilliant ...”

“... minds of that third-rate decade, the Sixties’ – betrayed a shaky grasp of cultural history. (Michael Foot’s description of Tebbit as ‘a semi-house-trained polecat’ may have revealed an equally shaky grasp of natural history, yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile ...”

“... Poems. Reading Merrill at length can feel like being trapped in endless rooms full of Ming Dynasty black lacquer furniture with mother-of-pearl inlays, and flowering begonias painted on, along with birds and butterflies alighting on pomegranate stems – it’s exquisitely fashioned, but makes you want to find the sanctuary of a Shaker meeting hall where one ...”

“... spectacle: ‘Kofi and Nane, both enormously attractive and disarmingly modest, the one short and black and the other tall and blonde, made for a dazzling couple: they projected a kind of moral glamour’ (sic). Meisler too dwells on Annan’s status as a ‘social star of New York society’, dining and partying three times a week. But disavowing ...”

“... notary Ser Petracco, the previous year. That she died in 1348 makes her a probable victim of the Black Death. According to a venerable tradition Laura was a Provençal woman called Laure de Noves, born in about 1310. She married Hugo or Hughes de Sade, of a landed family from Le Thor, a few miles south-east of Avignon. The marriage contract is dated 6 ...”

“... a sentimental and claustrophobic soap opera based on a bogus reading of locality. The compacted black-hole set has been devised to swallow segments of authentic geography, the pubs and squares of Hackney. And to compress all that multi-tongued buzz into a single rectangular block where everyone shouts or whispers threats into a mobile ...”

“... didn’t really know or even like but who just happened to be marooned in Oxford out of term.One black mark against Larkin is that he no more cares for the work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South ...”