“... 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 ...”

“... in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to ...”

“... Occupy Handbook, one essay that stands out is an old-fashioned piece of historical reportage by Michael Hiltzik. It’s called ‘The 5 per cent’, and it tells the story of the campaign during the 1930s to secure a decent social security programme for the elderly. In 1934, the number of Americans over the age of 65 was seven million, or just 5 per cent of ...”

“... time of the general election in April 1992, at which Major squeaked home for another term. When Black Wednesday came in September, the forcible ejection of sterling from the ERM was, by rights, as much a refutation of Labour’s official policy as of the government’s; but this time it was the Conservatives who suffered as the party of devaluation. Had ...”

“... City of God seems to have become the Left’s new paradigm of social change. In Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, Augustine provides the model for a counter-empire in which ‘the divine city is a universal city of aliens, coming together, co-operating, communicating.’ And even Slavoj Žižek, who complains that ‘in today’s critical and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mad’ in company with his intimate friend Mr Jericho Jabber, a thinly disguised Disraeli, who has black ringlets ‘that look as if they were made out of snakes and leeches’. Both men had had homosexual relationships and when, in February 1858, the Times reported that Bulwer-Lytton was in line for a cabinet post, Rosina wrote to the prime minister, Lord ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Daily Mail, a full-length Singer Sargent portrait, The Diary of a Nobody. In 1896, A. & C. Black purchased the rights to a dull annual almanac called Who’s Who and relaunched it the following year in a format designed to appeal to contemporary taste. The original Who’s Who of 1849 consisted of lists: members of the royal household, the House of ...”

“... part of Jerusalem. What happens to these fellers in the den or jungle of oblivion where the black becomes white, the white becomes the red is nobody’s business.The story itself is rather aimless and mostly intended to demonstrate the author’s hipness. Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away, by contrast, is the sad tale of a young woman who, at the ...”

“... 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 ...”