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“... of​ the great paradoxes of the Obama era is that it encouraged so many liberals, both black and white, to see the black experience in America not as a slow, arduous struggle for freedom culminating in the election of a black president – Obama’s version, not surprisingly – but as an unending nightmare. Not least among the reasons was that a black man ...”

“... the new Black Studies programme, where the visiting speakers included Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and James and Grace Lee Boggs.Cruse had been recruited in response to increasing discontent among Black students at the university. The publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in 1967 had turned him into a campus ...”

“... heir to the Bangwato chieftaincy and eventually the first president of Botswana, for marrying a white woman; the refusal to take a tougher line against apartheid – it has been essentially vindicated by the current harmonious relationship with an ANC-ruled South Africa, back within the Commonwealth. If the book has a hero it is Sir John Maud, the British ...”

“... appropriate dish for a pike or lamprey or salmon. Chrétien had previously written romances called Eric and Enide and The Knight with the Lion; others had written a Romance of Troy, a Romance of Eneas, and love stories called such things as Floris and Blauncheflour and Tristan. But The Story of the Serving-Dish? How can a serving-dish be a plausible subject of ...”

“... suddenly let him down. But it hasn’t changed. He has remembered where he is in moral time. The white poplar, a famous local beauty Today an old hag. The lake A bowl of slops, don’t touch it! The fuchsias among the snapdragon cheap and showy. Why? Last night in a dream I saw fingers pointing at me As though at a leper. They were worn by work and They were ...”

“... photographed by Cecil Beaton Runciman was born in 1903, one of the five children of Hilda and Walter Runciman, Liberal politicians who were the first married couple to sit simultaneously in Parliament. The considerable family fortune came from the shipping line founded by Walter’s father and the Runcimans’ five ...”

“... about abstraction. He joined a London exhibiting group headed by Ben Nicholson, whose pure white reliefs were the nearest indigenous parallel to the work of Continental avantgardists such as Mondrian, and devised his own handsomely workmanlike ‘Constructions’. In 1935 Piper’s girlfriend Myfanwy Evans launched Axis, a review of ...”

“... and, they went so far as to suggest, the secret of the RAF’s success in night-time raids. Walter Spradbery’s image of Temple Church for the ‘Proud City’ posters The carrot campaign was one of hundreds waged in Britain and the empire with posters, leaflets and films throughout the war. By turns advisory, exhortatory or simply informative they ...”

“... black businesses were owned by West Indians. In 1952, however, when Congress passed the McCarran Walter Act restricting migration, prospective migrants to the US were obliged to reconsider. The United Kingdom, where some of their kin had already settled, was an obvious choice. Officially, 492 West Indians, the majority of them Jamaican men with an average ...”

“... at Cambridge, Schlesinger went on to make several friends and acquaintances on the left, including Eric Hobsbawm. His early work focused squarely on class conflict. In his first academic article, written while he was an undergraduate, he presented the New England Transcendentalist Orestes Brownson as a ‘Marxist before Marx’, claiming that any other theory ...”

“... him, died recently, but is Jill still around? Where’s Shula? What’s with Eddie Grundy? Old Walter Gabriel must be long gone, but what happened to his scapegrace son, Nelson? Are the village shop and post office still open, or does everyone in Ambridge have to drive to Borchester to shop at Tesco? Is The Bull now part of the portfolio of Punch Taverns ...”

“... for this collision of ribbed domes and curved windows. The American architectural consultant Eric Kuhne, invited to talk the site up, spoke of a ‘new kind of city’, a ‘resort’. A form of petrol-guzzling tourism has evolved: Bluewater is a Ballardian resort (Vermilion Sands), shopping is secondary, punters come here to be part of the ...”

“... heroic narrative. Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing slavery, and ...”

“... and would they mind hanging on until the social worker arrived for a psychiatric assessment? Walter Brueggemann in The Message of the Psalms (1984) distinguishes three categories of psalm – psalms of ‘orientation’, ‘disorientation’ and ‘reorientation’ – and in Spirituality of the Psalms (2002), he claims that the attacks of 11 September ...”

“... of political theory. My favourite Indonesian fellow student in the mid-1960s was a middle-aged, white-haired historian called Soemarsaid Moertono, whom we all affectionately called ‘Mas Moer’. Mas is a Javanese term of address, a little more formal than ‘big brother’ but close to its meaning. He showed me the drafts of his MA thesis on aspects of ...”