“... 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 ...”

“... there is a note of regret that such financial and industrial eminences as John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor Straus and Harry Widener should have given up their lives not just to their own women, but to impoverished foreigners – the Guggenheims and Strauses apparently being accorded an honorary Aryanness for the occasion. The San Francisco ...”

“... in the middle of light pedestrian traffic on Fifth Avenue. Neatly dressed in a suit and shiny black shoes, with a very slight smile, Grosz looks as though he’s conquering New York, as he did Berlin. His autobiography had appeared two years before, celebrated by Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker, who compared Grosz’s new Cape Cod paintings to ...”

“... visiting a son in the American South in 1927. When the bus leaves Washington for Virginia, the black passengers move silently to the back, segregating the whole bus, except for Paley’s mother and older sister, who are sitting in what is now the wrong section. The driver asks them to move, but Paley’s mother refuses. ‘When I first tried to write this ...”

“... I first heard​ of Benjamin Disraeli in a school assembly when I was ten or eleven. Our headmaster also taught history, and though he was known to us mainly as an expert in horse-drawn hoes, seed drills and threshing machines, that day he introduced us to a man born into the wrong religion and given an imperfect education, an author of unlikely novels and unlikelier cheques, sniffed at by the upper classes when he arrived at their dinner tables and baited by the mob when he asked for their votes ...”

“... is a common expression of alienation in Lispector’s work. ‘I identified more strongly with the black horse than with Barbara Laage,’ she said of a French movie she had been urged to see because of her resemblance to its star. In The Besieged City equine imagery is often used to describe Lucrécia. (‘On her big horse face a tear was running ...”

“... and jukebox joints had developed in America, and Jamaican sound systems had served Britain’s black communities with Nat King Cole, calypso and early forms of reggae. In Britain, by 1960 La Discothèque had opened in Wardour Street, and clubs such as the Place in Hanley and the Plaza in Manchester had instituted disc-only sessions. In the early Sixties ...”

“... Two bishops side by side put pressure at long range on the pawns defending the castled Black king. My queen, ready to advance to the middle of the board, completes the threat. Black will have to weaken his defence by advancing a pawn. There are further forces I can bring into play ...”

“... of the democratic experiment with ill-concealed satisfaction. ‘Everybody is laughing at us,’ Benjamin Moran, the under-secretary at the US Legation in London, complained. The Saturday Review jeered at Seward, who, ‘though he cannot keep the Federal fort at Charleston, has several times announced his intention of annexing Canada’. In the ...”

“... thoroughness, the Macedonians turned him over to the CIA, which flew him to the ‘Salt Pit’, a black site in Afghanistan. He told his American captors the same thing he’d told the Macedonians: he was an innocent man, a German citizen on vacation. He made a living selling cars. He had no connections to al-Qaida or any other jihadis. After el-Masri had ...”

“... with water. The ship began to list to port. With admirable foresight, William Bond, the ship’s black steward, went to the cabins and began to bring up the sea chests belonging to Chase and the Essex’s captain, George Pollard. Each contained quadrants, charts and navigation tables. Chase and his men unlashed the one remaining whaleboat, put the chests in ...”

“... Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with life’ which allowed African Americans to navigate a white ...”

“... as a young man, made him ‘universally unpopular’; his odd flashes (not very frequent) of black and frightening anger, and his occasional tetchiness about adverse criticism during his years of fame. He dates the fixing of Foucault’s physical ‘image’, the mad surgeon look, to his time at the University of Tunis in 1966-8; it was then that he ...”

“... to. There were two desks and a lot of men standing and sitting in the room. Near the window was a black man in the most awful state. He was staggering, wet, and his nose seemed to be bleeding all over his clothes. I closed the door quickly. Feeling I was being followed, I ran down to the door at the very end and opened it. I had a quick glimpse of Dave ...”

“... which resonated compatibly with the incipient politics of the decade. Sontag mediated the works of Benjamin, Barthes, Genet, Godard, Resnais, Bresson, Riefenstahl and Canetti to that American audience which listens first to what is spoken from New York. Every essay, in her lively early collections, enacted her declaration of faith in the indissoluble quiddity ...”