“... is always easier to obey if you dare not disobey. German women are to their lords like so many black beetles’: John Butler Yeats (father of the poet and of the painter Jack B. Yeats) was aware that people had a propensity to see others as beetles, but he thought it bad for them and for their art, and he deprecated the propensity when he found it in his ...”

“... in his attitude to the Jews’: but this did not stop him from taking a leaf out of Hitler’s black book. ‘His greatest mistake’: this rang a cracked bell for me. Less than twenty pages later, we bump into Ezra Pound at Mosley’s Black House, along with his pamphlet for the British Union of Fascists, ‘What is ...”

“... as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humoured, sweet Beckett.’ Christopher Middleton writes: ‘Well before the 1920s, the text for Walser is a non-thing, as much so as a Cubist guitar or Magritte’s apple (“Ceci n’est pas une pomme”).’* Other comparisons include the composer Satie, the painter Rousseau, the ...”

“... slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent advocates for Black rights in the Reconstruction era, and was elected to Congress in 1890. By 1901, however, when Hughes was born, the spread of Jim Crow laws had eroded the promise of emancipation and Black suffrage. In his testimony to ...”

“... including Egan, the saxophonist Max Raymond and John Roman, a Vietnam veteran who is also the only black character in the book – eventually decide to take action against Mortimer, but their plans seem worryingly ineffectual. Nor are these the only goings-on around Eagle Lake: indeed, Mortimer’s reign of terror takes up a surprisingly small part of the ...”

“... pausing on a bridge to light his pipe and look over his shoulder, the whole scene held in grainy black and white. Here a world of crime and mystery was about to unfold, but in a special inflection of the thriller genre that kept thrills to a minimum. Then along came Bond and Bondery, the fast-moving, sex-drenched and gadget-packed fantasy of the new Cold ...”

“... Hirschbein’s Miriam and Mendele’s Valley of Tears. The persistent tales of auction blocks – black slave style – in restaurants at ports of arrival may or may not be well-founded, but ‘it seems likely that something like nine thousand Jewish women came to practise prostitution in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay during the quarter-century ...”

“... he paid $3 a pop – but this was definitely a record.) However, when Mr X gets out his fat black book – ‘I record everything too,’ he explains – and starts giving an account of his exploits, Pomeroy, voicing Reisman-like disgust, storms out of the room. In reality, Kinsey and his circle were obsessed with Mr X. They travelled 3141 miles from ...”

“... prevalent among the chattering classes of northern California, you will probably agree with Christopher Lasch that theirs is a culture of narcissism. If you rather admire these people’s attitudes and way of life, you may describe it as a culture of tolerance. If you have mixed feelings, you might settle for the description Charles Taylor suggests: it ...”

“... Christopher Andersen’s book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross. But what do you expect? Madonna’s wedding was different from other people’s. The plans were made in secrecy, and backed by armed force. ‘Even the caterer ... was kept in the dark until the last minute.’ You also, you may protest, have been to weddings where the caterer has seemed to be taken by surprise ...”

“... passages which didn’t survive into the final text: an account of the lynching of a pregnant black woman – ‘One of the niggers was a pregnant woman and when they hoisted her up she gave birth to the baby. The crowd played football with it’ – a description of the journey to O’Brien’s flat, and an account of the meeting of Julia and Winston ...”

“... holiday on the Ionian coast in The Lost Daughter is disrupted by a brash group from Naples, ‘the black well I came from’, is made uneasy by children’s games too. Watching a beautiful young mother and her daughter playing with a doll, which they fail to give ‘a stable, constant voice’, Leda likens her irritation to ‘a slight twinge that … becomes ...”

“... British colonists and Anglican clergy pitted against sixty thousand enslaved rebels and some free black Dissenting missionaries. Observers in Britain feared that Jamaica might be the next Haiti. It took a brutal counterinsurgency led by Sir Willoughby Cotton – ‘a veteran of Wellington’s campaigns in Spain and Belgium’, as Taylor describes him – to ...”

“... as I gained the shelter of the vestibule when I saw a poster facing me. Executed in yellow and black, it was a combined logo featuring the Star of David, the Islamic star and crescent, the Roman Catholic cross and the more elaborate cruciform of the Serbian and Bosnian Orthodox. Gens una summus,read the superscription. ‘We are one ...”

“... been traced with such keenness as here. Of the young Hetty Johnson, Ehrenpreis says: ‘She had black, black hair and the enchanting gift of docility.’ The word ‘docility’ has gone hideously downhill, and the word ‘teachable’ has never risen above the unfeeling. The biographer can but do his best with such ...”