“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Marxist Feminist, Esther the Rhodesian dissident and Liberty the firm-breasted, AK 47-toting black guerrilla. The narrative has lots of sexy bits of the ‘he impaled the warm meat of her loins on his questing finger’ kind. News from Nowhere begins with the 1968 May ‘revolution’ in Paris: a great and blissful moment. It ends with a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pompidou gives over a vast and starkly lit vitrine to one of these screens: a wall of 28 hinged black panels that throw elaborate reflections on the gallery floor. She produced a pure black lacquered square to be mounted on a wall like a flat-screen TV in 1915 – the same year as Malevich’s more celebrated ...”

“... respect for human rights.‘I am guided by several principles when it comes to the West Bank,’ Benjamin Netanyahu said at an event this summer to celebrate forty years of the Samaria Regional Council, which governs the settlements. ‘The first: this is our homeland. The second: we will continue to build and develop it. Third: not one resident or community ...”

“... suggests that these forms of resistance ‘may have backfired’ by leading whites to consider black men and women ‘lazy and clumsy workers … a stereotype that continues to this day’. Washington certainly believed that blacks were indolent by nature. But this was an integral part of the ideological justification for slavery, echoed throughout the ...”

“... lives that will never be fully known. ‘I prefer the books just as I found them, covered in black,’ Juan says, before introducing the possibility that he might have blacked the passages out himself. ‘Filled with little poems of illumination. A counternarrative to whatever might have been Dr Henry’s agenda.’ The blackouts of the title refer to ...”