“... depleted guerrilla fighters. Two influential dramas, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William Hoffman’s As Is, compared people with Aids to the Jews suffering Nazi persecution. This comparison has the virtue of rather brutally illuminating the moral condition of those who watch the catastrophe with detachment. Yet the metaphors of combat and ...”

“... its windows; the crazy hole in the dancer’s torso to the left, through which a white-and-red-striped gobstopper whirls towards us like a bullet down a barrel – these are devices that none of us can follow. The power of mind here is chilling. Art historians race for the safety of iconography. Let me just speak (again with the present ...”

“... with the lefty technocrats, Johnson went with the utopian socialists too. It was in the spirit of William Morris, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin that those family gaggles of Routemaster fans came out to bid the old version of the bus farewell, in the belief that efficiency and the bottom line aren’t enough, that the artefacts a city holds in common must be ...”

“... them to the crime. ‘There is, in short, no smoking gun,’ the former State Department official William Rogers wrote in a letter to Foreign Affairs objecting to a favourable review of Kornbluh’s book. Tanya Harmer, in Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, wants to set aside arguments over who was at fault for any particular Cold War ...”

“... to the shadowy, sooty margins: the focus is on the road in front. There is social variety to match William Frith, but none of his static staginess. Instead, we loom over the shoulder of a young woman, facing the stream; beggars, chatting couples of both sexes, women with children, a soldier signalling in bold red, walk towards us. A gent close to the kerb is ...”

“... in order to get on the road to Waterloo. The church felt proudly ecumenical, as much mosque as white Catholic periscope. The ascent, with spindly handrails, grids of shadow and a looming bell, recalled Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The cold tower was tight and claustrophobic and we struggled to identify the jigsaw of communes through the slats of giant ...”

“... was nothing like the one he tarted up for his memoirs. Brussel’s real advice was to search White Plains, New York for an egomaniacal German high-school graduate in his forties with a facial scar; an expert in bomb-making; a man who had ‘a classic textbook case of paranoia’, rather than a genuine beef. Whoops. The evidence which led to the capture ...”

“... sand with a twig, poems with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’. Like John Clare, he found his poems in the fields and wrote them down. ‘I heard a mysterious sound in nature,’ he later said. ‘That sound became poetry in my life.’ He wrote that his ‘earliest experience of the nature of poetry’ was a ...”

“... literary editor who had made a name for himself rescuing the rejected (as one of their number, William Gass, put it). David ‘insisted’ that his wife should return to Vienna to face her past. Finally, she said, she was able to weep, ‘the whole week in Vienna, and all over the Austrian Alps’. Then it was time to go home to Riverside Drive.But further ...”

“... on his mind and took no notice. In any case, the Confessio does not criticise the regime. But ‘William Langland’, author of the satirical and apocalyptic masterpiece Piers Plowman, had to write it under a pseudonym. If his true identity had been known, he might easily have ended up in the Tower. The author of Richard the Redeless (‘Richard the ...”

“... his own report on the extermination at My Lai and sending it to Congress. He told me that, poor white boy as he was (he left school at 14 and was drafted without protest), he had been in basic training when, in the hut one night, a group of good ol’ boys had decided to have some fun with the only black soldier in the detail. The scheme was to castrate ...”

“... out of which Iain Sinclair’s writing comes. Before he moved into fiction with his first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, in 1987, Sinclair had already been publishing his own, extraordinary poems, his own, extraordinary researches into the secret history of London, with a tiny press he ran from his own East London home, for a good twelve years. He ...”

“... fought alongside large numbers of indigenous Indians and Southern blacks who viewed the local white settlers and slave-owners as being more dangerous than the imperial authorities in London. Such clashes but also collaborations between different peoples are surely what make imperial history (and we ideally need another name for it) such a compelling and ...”

“... And one can see that they perpetuate (if that is the word) the original distinction between the white Downtown and the adjacent black area which serviced it. Later, I find myself questioning my surge of emotion. Later still, an African-American friend speaks of the place as a kind of disgrace. When I suggest showing it to a friend visiting from England, he ...”

“... that Crane’s poems wouldn’t let you do to them. Crane produced two prodigious books of poetry, White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930), and died at the age of 33 by jumping off a ship bound for New York. After such a brief life and dramatic death he seemed like the very stuff of poetic legend, a Chatterton-and-Rimbaud of his time. He was a famous ...”