“... newly independent regimes in Mozambique and Angola were fêted in South Africa’s townships. ‘Black South Africans had found it hard to believe that white power could ever be overthrown,’ R.W. Johnson writes in How Long Will South Africa Survive? ‘Now this disbelief vanished overnight.’1 The 1976 Soweto uprising, a turning point in the South African ...”

“... my) memory. The house-ends facing the Corner have giant murals in powerful, Guernica-style black and white. One shows a body lying lifeless on the pavement below. Another depicts Bernadette Devlin MP, as she then was, throwing down stones to build a barricade. Another has a British soldier breaking into a house with a sledgehammer; while on the ...”

“... of this estate, a hundred acres of manzanita thickets, with open stretches of ponderosa pine, black oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass – and one of the most seductive houses in America, self-conceived and self-constructed. The land was purchased in 1966, after Snyder returned to California following periods as a Zen Buddhist monk in Kyoto, in ...”

“... Bacon took her to a ‘bad street’, what she saw was a place ‘just crammed with people, mostly black people, walking on the sidewalks and sitting on the stoops and leaning out of the windows’. In the ‘good one’, by contrast, there was just a lone boy kicking a tyre into a gutter. ‘Ed, nobody’s here,’ she said to Bacon, according to Robert ...”

“... of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about diverting, strange, glamorous subjects – and that glamour should not be taken seriously. He was also writing pieces in his own highly original style – pieces that were often ...”

“... in many novelists today, particularly younger ones, who recognise the current literary value of a black world view but themselves possess cheerful, even sunny temperaments. They turn out The Good Companions in reverse, well aware that their escapist world will seem as convincing to today’s readers as Priestley’s did to subscribers in the Thirties. The ...”

“... His determination to see nature as benign has been called a flaw by his most intelligent critic, Michael Cohen, in The Pathless Way. As we climbed together on a route called Great White Book in the Tuolumne domes east of Yosemite, he told me how Muir was disconcerted by the writhen and stunted junipers rooting in crevices of the granite because they were ...”

“... demonstrations. As for his parents, ‘I would disappoint their hopes of a profession and be a black sheep. I carefully oiled and greased my rifle, wrapped it in oily rags, and made my brothers promise to take care of it. Then I left home in March of 1918.’ At 20, he joined the brotherhood of freedom-fighters, who now became his closest family. ...”

“... Milton Keynes is a direct descendant of Bloomsbury seems about as plausible as trying to show that Michael Foot speaks with the authentic voice of the Levellers. More fundamentally, the central argument of this book, that London’s homely architecture is the product and expression of Londoners’ homely virtues, is chronologically unsound. Most of the ...”

“... to resist Turkey’s invasion of one-third of Cyprus in 1974. No Task Force defended the black majority in Rhodesia, when Ian Smith illegally seized power in 1965. Britain did not identify with the East Timorese or the people of West Sahara when they were taken over by the Indonesians and Moroccans in 1975 – even though 50,000 Timorese died in a ...”

“... With no more murmurs in the Liberal ranks In Labour’s there is total consternation. If Michael Foot tore out his hair in hanks He could not look more prone to perturbation. The right wing loudly calls the left wing cranks And no one stays calm in the altercation Except for Tony Benn, who sucks contentedly On his prop pipe and stares ahead ...”

“... sashayed over to his wardrobe, and navigated my way across the sea of footwear to his black Pierre Cardin alligator-skin shoes I’d secretly always had my eye on.’) Like so many Soho lives, Bernie’s ended badly, by his own hand, but he was a prize. He would sort anybody out with a drink or out of a spot, and it’s impossible to remember his ...”

“... as I tried to navigate the right Morlock tunnel, the least unreliable lift, was that the black hole at the epicentre of this vortex of urban restlessness was a necropolis to the age of cinema. The votive spectre, sentimentalised, inflated, patched into every available blank space, was Charles Spencer Chaplin: ‘London’s world famous star’. Child ...”

“... Unionism. Unsurprisingly, Unionists had few friends in the newspapers. A bizarre exception was Michael Wharton, a satirical and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions ...”

“... lesson in the fragility of popularity and public esteem. Pacelli was a favoured son of Rome’s ‘black nobility’, the cluster of families whose 19th-century fortunes were built on service to the papacy. In these circles, the Pacellis ranked very high, described by one historian as the most important papal family since the Borgias. Eugenio’s ...”