“... but fearing opposition I did so without consulting anyone; two hundred people gathered in the hall. This is Lahore in 1961. The mood was quite internationalist, and I said: ‘This is what’s happened – we cannot let this be … Lumumba’s murder must not go without a response, let’s do it now, before anyone can stop us.’ So two hundred of us ...”

“... flaubertising in the foreground, the background originally held the figure of the model Jerry Hall breastfeeding her baby. She sat thus for several months, until one day she called in sick. When, a couple of days later, she was still unfit to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the ...”

“... for having lost a note his mother once left in his lunchbox by breaking the glass on Dad’s John Coltrane poster, and Dad understands. The book’s emotional landscape may be desolate but it is fully energised. The sections flit from parable to skit to list, with sudden swerves, so that an odd dark fable about fraternal conflict ends as an exam ...”

“... Paisley is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his biographer, describes the sinister shabbiness of this occasion, the nervous fascination of the audience laughing at a renegade Spanish priest reciting unfamiliar Latin words, the canny showmanship, the plastic buckets brimming with ...”

“... sat so Martin could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so we all can fly!’ John McCain, hapless Republican candidate in 2008, charged that his rival was a lightweight international ‘celebrity’, like Britney Spears. To many white liberals, however, Obama seemed to guarantee instant redemption from the crimes of a democracy built on ...”

“... better than ‘a collective denial of the past’. He does not record his thoughts on the Hardware Hall at the Imperial War Museum (informally known, even inside the IWM, as the largest boy’s bedroom in Britain), but having toured Britain’s war museums in the summer of 1998, he draws a more general conclusion: ‘Even today there is no hint in any British ...”

“... inner eye Rita burned on an electric pad. I rushed after the nurses as they wheeled her down the hall and cried out: ‘Don’t put my sister on an electric pad!’ Rita heard the fear in my voice. She put her hand out to mine from under the blanket and said: ‘Don’t worry so, darling. Everything will be all right!’ I persisted and cried out ...”

“... its founders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, were the first couple to get married when City Hall opened to same-sex weddings in 2004; and while the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City are justly famous, drag queens in San Francisco had demonstrated against police oppression three years earlier in the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, and a number of cabaret ...”

“... curator of the museum – the ‘Wonder House’. The curator is a tribute to Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, who moved to Bombay as curator of the J.J. School of Art in 1865, the year of Kipling’s birth. But through the figure of the curator, Kipling also indirectly acknowledges the existence of a colonial India of intellectual collaboration ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... in the play of a great free-wheeling exercised intelligence (‘I will walke heere in the Hall ... ’tis the breathing time of day with me’) makes the work what it is, the world’s most sheerly entertaining tragedy, the cleverest, perhaps even the funniest. Dr Johnson meant this when he gave it ‘the praise of variety’, adding: ‘The pretended ...”

“... them as twenty years ought to make). She may have made Gaskell up altogether. The parsonage hall is accurately rendered; perhaps Hassall took it from life.It’s not a particularly remarkable image, just the sort one comes across by accident, one of the many that illustrated the Brontës’ novels and books about them, as well as romances of famous ...”

“... getting one’s bearings. The revised English edition includes later news taking us to the Anita Hall case and the reactions to Thelma and Louise. Yet Marilyn French’s The War against Women is the more telling book. It is brief, where Faludi is excursive; it does not wear the accoutrements of research as well (it has no index), and it is written in a much ...”

“... and newspaper headline, impression and chronicle. For the middlebrow modernism of U.S.A., John Dos Passos shrewdly kept those registers apart, offering them separately on the page under the headings camera eye and newsreel. Here they are mashed together, and the effect is distinctly lumpy. There’s a reference to Firbank late in the book and perhaps ...”

“... The rather pat conclusion arrived at is that it would be wrong to consider Mrs Benson as Radclyffe Hall in a cap and bonnet. Fred remembered as a child asking his mother to explain the difference between a bull and an ox: ‘she at once said that the bull was the father and the ox the uncle.’ That the Benson brothers were oxen and uncles is beyond doubt, but ...”