“... 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 ...”

“... to think tanks. Leading the rightist rising were the conservative intellectuals in the orbit of William F. Buckley’s National Review and the zealous campus activists of Young Americans for Freedom (a group ultimately larger and far more influential than the much celebrated leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly ...”

“... In October​ 1961, John F. Kennedy and the entire White House press corps decamped to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to watch US airborne forces put on a show of power. It was the president’s first foray out of the Boston-Washington DC corridor to ‘meet the people’, and in his acerbic book The Best and the Brightest, published a decade later, David Halberstam described it as ‘a real whizbang day ...”

“... 9835. This created the Federal Employee Loyalty and Security Program, a decision, as Truman’s White House counsel Clark Clifford later admitted, driven by the prospect of the 1948 election and not by any security menace: ‘We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured.’ Truman himself, in private correspondence, said ...”

“... could see that they were demolishing an old bridge. There were diggers pulling and hauling, men in white helmets climbing over steel girders, right in the shadow of a great steeple. The church was fancy, the steeple very high. I thought only television masts went as high as that. The four-arch bridge across the River Irvine was built by a certain Thomas Brown ...”

“... went to a trade-union dance with her friends from the Medical Institute. She wore a red dress and white slippers. She was asked to dance by an American – at first, she thought he might come from one of the Baltic countries – who called himself Alik. She liked him; he was very polite, sweet and reserved. He was well-dressed. She took him to meet her ...”

“... a young black woman who would end up a follower of Malcolm X. Monroe, it turned out, was the only white star who had ever interested Christine. In fact she identified with her: ‘She’s been hurt. She knows the score … I don’t read the gossip stuff. That’s what comes out of her movies. She’s someone who was abused. I could identify with her. I never ...”

“... wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did. ‘I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards,’ Fogle says. It ...”

“... Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William Phillips, who co-edited Partisan Review with Rahv, described her as ‘one of our most cutting minds’, ‘charming even when most devastating or malicious’. Isaiah Berlin said she was ‘much more bitchy’ than Mary McCarthy, ‘but sharper and more ...”

“... for example, in a speech which Paisley made in 1973, the year the House of Commons approved a White Paper for a Northern Ireland Assembly. During the Commons debate, Paisley said this: In many senses we have been caught up in a struggle that goes far beyond the basic differences between two sections of the community. There are other elements in the ...”