“... crosses embroidered on their uppers, put aside the red velvet papal cap and dressed himself in the black cassock and broad-brimmed hat of a country priest. Half an hour later, in a state of great agitation, he left the papal audience chamber in the Quirinale Palace by an internal stairway and tiptoed down to the courtyard, where a carriage was waiting for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... when, in the hut one night, a group of good ol’ boys had decided to have some fun with the only black soldier in the detail. The scheme was to castrate him. Nobody was more astonished than Ron to hear his own voice coming across the darkened bunks. ‘“If you want to get to him, you’ve got to come through me.” I’d’ve been dead if I hadn’t been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set about reprinting Fante’s books. Bukowski, who had been devoted to both books ‘like a man who had found gold in the city dump’ since discovering them by chance in the early 1950s, contributed an autobiographical preface to Ask the ...”

“... camera peers past him to flag it up, in the style of a Hitchcock movie or a Tintin book – a black Citroën DS, the car Barthes put on the cover of Mythologies (1957), in which there’s a discussion of its then futuristic lines, has followed him since his first visit to the Salpêtrière. Inside it are two men with moustaches, umbrellas, cheap suits and ...”