“... William Carlos Williams was also obsessed with howBeauty should make us paupers,should blind us, rob us – for itdoes not feed the sufferer.Equally, the world that Heaney has been enduring since the mid-Sixties has often exerted a despotic pressure. He is not simply the Keatsian harvester beloved of school examination boards, but a deeply political writer ...”

“... to black Americans. The Monroe Ride was hosted by Robert Franklin Williams. Nicknamed ‘Chairman Rob’ by his supporters, Williams was second only to the Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X as an outspoken advocate of ‘armed self-reliance’. The head of the Monroe branch of the NAACP in the 1950s, he assembled a well-armed militia to defend blacks from ...”

“... Jamaican woman and the white plantation owner who had raped her. After he left Jamaica as a young man, Wedderburn never returned for fear of being hanged: ‘such’, he wrote of the plantocracy, ‘is their hatred of anyone having black blood in his veins.’ No one tried to hang him in Britain on account of his race, but he never outran the fear and ...”

“... curtains of Irish lace. ‘That dog has no right to be walking over there,’ said the lady. The young man smiled and snapped his fingers. ‘Dog got no sense of history,’ he said, then he laughed. ‘And you got none neither,’ she said, pressing the tissue into her sleeve. Only ten minutes’ walk from the Kennedy house in Brookline, another ...”

“... When I was young people didn’t die and they didn’t pass away. They certainly didn’t expire, or perish, though there was a woman in our street called Hazel who dabbled in spiritualism while her philandering husband went out to fix people’s Hotpoint twin-tubs, and she quite often spoke of people who had ‘crossed to the other side ...”

“... tradition that I grew up with’. His first example is an Orange song; his second, ‘Come all you young rebels’, reminds us that (as students of trad music know) Unionist, Republican and non-political texts often take the same tunes. Alas, what seems to be the only study of Heaney and traditional music, Seán Crosson’s ‘The Given Note’, attacks him ...”

“... to dream of being a writer: ‘No one saw them; there was no one likely to be interested.’ As a young woman she flirted with new ideas but remained cautious; she began a career but left it for marriage. She was settled with two children, a hundred miles from Juniper Hill, before her first attempt at publication. The books follow Laura (Flora) from her ...”

“... as they reached us, the leader, eyes heavy with opium, shouted in Farsi: ‘You have come here to rob the graves. You are grave robbers. I will not let you take this gold. It is for us. If anyone digs here it is us. I will call the police. Give me your ID card.’ We ignored them and went back to get the mule before leaving the village. The men followed us ...”

“... case is exemplary. Bevins follows the story of the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL), a small group of young, non-party radicals in São Paulo who protested against a 20 cent rise in the city bus fare. Some were middle-class students; others – like Mayara, a strong voice in the book – came from anarcho-punk subcultures and had service jobs in bars or ...”

“... a paperweight. ‘A coloured spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life.’ A young aristocrat, 75 per cent composed of foraged mushrooms, asks his pristine parents what an erection is, and they tell him that Tolstoy has died. Who can’t relate? But while these early impressions are documented photographically, his ...”

“... giorno natale.’ Hardly a joke, in the circumstances it merits a smile, but from this mirthless young man nothing is forthcoming. I lay my head down again. At least I seem to have stopped bleeding. Birthdays were never made much of in our family. Mine, as I told the Italian doctor, is on 9 May and my brother’s too, though he is three years older than I ...”

“... common-sense gun laws’, then the NRA takes to the airwaves, ideally with an attractive young mother as its spokeswoman. She’ll say: gun control doesn’t work, it just keeps law-abiding folks from protecting their children, since criminals will always find a way to get guns. In Chicago they have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and ...”

“... mostly for breach of the peace and drug offences. Only eight were eventually charged; one DJ, Rob Tissera, was sentenced to three months for inciting a riot and the ‘dishonest abstraction of electricity’. The raid capped two years of escalating tension between ravers and the police. Acid house had exploded in 1987, the year Ecstasy started to become ...”

“... economy, but the value of the currency is untouchable. It is no surprise that a majority of the young and the economically active voted ‘no’ in the referendum, since they are the ones who are paying the price for the monetary policy of the euro zone in terms of unemployment, insecurity and low wages. Struggling to respond to these powerful arguments in ...”

“... first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost purposefully unprofessional.After the show, Taylor says: ‘They’re just AWFUL.’‘They ARE awful,’ agrees Brian. ‘But I also think they’re fabulous.’There’s a hint of steely camp in that ‘fabulous’ of ...”