“... momentum. People clustered to watch this marvel, as they had once thronged to see the young Benjamin Franklin, a proselytiser for the virtues of swimming, paring his toenails as he lay on his back in mid-Thames. There seemed no limit to man’s ability to defy the natural laws. It was not essential to limit the number of wheels to two, but tricycles and ...”

“... from these literary crimes creates a whole other self – he becomes a book collector. Walter Benjamin wrote of the different ways to acquire books: one could write them oneself, one could borrow them, ‘with its attendant non-returning’, one could buy them from catalogues, auctions or bookshops. He doesn’t mention stealing as one of the options, or ...”

“... a graphic look compounded of stage flats and wizened textures picked out in brass-rubbing black, ceiling white, royal blue and pillarbox red. Here was a love of the notionally unspoilt, a harking back to George V Georgian and, ideally, to the Georgian of Georges IV, III and II, not to mention the Edwardian of Edward the Confessor. Steeped in the ...”

“... of the gallant South’, as Billie Holiday might have described it, was open to anyone who hated black people and Jews, from members of the Ku Klux Klan to neo-Nazis. Emboldened by having an ally in the highest office in the land, they came with Confederate flags, swastikas, medieval-looking wooden shields, torches and, of course, guns. They came to ...”

“... Many enlisted. By the end of the Civil War 180,000 had served – about a fifth of the country’s black male population aged between 18 and 45. In the Revolutionary War of 1775-83, when the 13 American colonies sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for ...”

“... by yellow fever in 1796. Malarial mosquitoes swarmed every summer, as the British architect Benjamin Latrobe reported in horror in 1819: As soon as the sun sets, the muskitoes appear in clouds and fill every room in the house, as well as the open air. Their noise is so loud as to startle a stranger to its daily occurrence. It fills the air, and there ...”

“... Irish, whose communities have had the greatest experience of political disadvantage and unrest. Black poets here are less reluctant than white to give vent to their frustrations – they don’t recognise didacticism as a ‘problem’. Nor does Tom Paulin, who as a critic is much concerned with British and Irish politics, and as a poet mixes references to ...”

“... older brother, heir to the family property, including Stratford Hall, later earned the nickname ‘Black Horse’ for his transgressions: first, he seduced and impregnated his wife’s teenage sister (the baby died in suspicious circumstances); then he defrauded her family and fled to Paris. Robert was raised by his mother in a townhouse in Alexandria. His ...”

“... inside were real: Mick Kelly, who heard music in the inner room; Dr Benedict Mady Copeland, a black Marxist dying of tuberculosis who thought continually of the advancement of his people; Biff Brannon, the brusque owner of the New York Café, who sometimes wished he were a mother; the deaf-mute Singer with his flying hands. How were they real? The back ...”

“... dots, primary colours and thick contours – the light ground of the dots first, the heavy black of the outlines last. Thus, while a Lichtenstein might look industrially ready-made, it is actually, as Michael Lobel demonstrates in his careful study, a layering of mechanical reproduction (comic), handwork (drawing), mechanical reproduction again ...”

“... as a replacement.In an essay of 1983, Alice Walker writes of her grief for ‘this sickly, frail Black girl’ whose ‘loyalties were completely divided, as was, without question, her mind’. Walker ridicules Wheatley’s ‘bewildered tongue’, the ‘stiff, struggling, ambivalent lines’ of her verse. But she also offers understanding to the child who ...”

“... used throughout Slaughterhouse-Five and these poems, like many of Vonnegut’s novels, are full of black comedy, peculiar characters and apocalyptic events. The typical Woodward apocalypse is centred on the breakfast-table. In ‘A Cook’s Warning’ the kitchen is described as ‘Home’s most dangerous room’ while in ‘A Nocturnal Breakfast’ he ...”

“... tiresome adherence to the ‘correspondence theory of truth’, and directed them to Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Excavation and Memory’, where Benjamin argues that genuine memory yields an image of the person who remembers rather than simply cataloguing events.It’s true that the protocols of Anglo creative ...”

“... to steal the form away from the right. Inventing a Nation borrows its essential narrative from Benjamin Franklin’s dark benediction over the newly written constitution. That, too, was a parlous moment for American liberty. Eleven years after breaking with England, the United States seemed destined for chaos. Each cantankerous state governed itself and ...”

“... as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn. It is this curious icon which inspired Rogin’s formidable book. The Jolson ...”