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“... of 1878 shares a certain formal identity with Whistler’s all too famous Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (1871) in terms of pose and colour, but Cassatt’s mother is shown not staring blankly into space, an object within a world of objects, but rather in solid three-quarter view, and reading with great concentration. What ...”

“... into ‘sticking eternal bits of paper into innumerable books, and putting larger papers into black boxes’. But he still wrote: over four hundred articles and eighty large-scale essays. Why did they write so much and write so well? All of these books strive, with varying degrees of success, to reconstruct the mind behind the words and the works, to ...”

“... the incision, the red wound and hand, so harsh and sudden against the swooning white thigh and the black coats.’ Composition, colour and pictorial focus converge effortlessly in this passage, which makes a single portion of the vast canvas come vividly alive. Sometimes, however, the surface is a little too smooth, the rhetoric too slick, the verbiage too ...”

“... with intermittent malaria, plus the shock of unprecedented sexual bliss. Either way, the record is black. Nelson first helped the King and Queen of Naples to escape from local republicans. He then used the might of his fleet to blockade the short-lived Neapolitan Republic, and presided distantly but effectively over the show-trials and summary executions of ...”

“... tended to be more open and meritocratic than most European land-based organisations at this time. Black sailors were not immune from discrimination, but those who were freemen and even some who were slaves seem often to have enjoyed better prospects and treatment on board Royal Navy ships than blacks labouring on the land. Jews were disproportionately ...”

“... It’s a good time to be a Muslim writing about ‘the trouble with Islam’, to borrow the title of a recent jeremiad by Irshad Manji, a Pakistani-Canadian lesbian feminist. Readers in the West, especially Americans, are eager to know ‘what went wrong with Islam’, as Bernard Lewis delicately puts it, particularly if it can be traced to cultural pathology and envy of ‘our freedom ...”

“... Linda Grant’s new novel, We Had It So Good, begins in sunshine. There’s the epigraph: ‘He had like many another been born in full sunlight and lived to see night fall.’ (That’s from Waugh’s Men at Arms.) Then the first image: Stephen Newman in his shorts, aged nine, on the ‘most exciting day’ of his life – a day spent in the fur storage depot in which his father looks after Marilyn Monroe’s mink ...”

“... case this is anyhow not the intention. The hero is her husband, the former newspaper tycoon Conrad Black, once the owner of the Telegraph group, the Jerusalem Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. He was convicted of fraud in 2007 for siphoning off profits from his companies, although two of the three convictions were later quashed, and served more than three years ...”

“... separated) twins, James Lewis and James Springer, had each married and divorced women named Linda and remarried women named Betty, we would need some kind of random sample of all the other people born on the same day (for instance) who married women named Linda and Betty – a cumbersome, if not ...”

“... of race in America must be made right’, and from her student days she conscientiously sought out black friends, while also setting out to learn. One of her earliest mentors was Marian Wright Edelman, the first black woman to be admitted to the bar in Mississippi. Hillary has also repeatedly championed women’s rights in ...”

“... and sinuous shapes and rules, the quartier of Texaco is the urban embodiment of black memory. That memory, dislocated and improvised, does not include Africa. The story begins with chaos in the belly of a slave ship, continues with the slave cabins scattered around the Grand-Case, the first incarnation of City – or l’En-ville – to ...”

“... honed in underground journalism. Even the arrangement of the text (choice quotations outlined in black breaking up pages at random) seemed novel. What made the book a bestseller, though, was the multi-facetedness of its author. Here was an evidently very clever female academic trained in the arts of rhetoric and polemic, with an armoury of literary and ...”

“... ladies. But their ranking in Thatcher’s Conservatism is best summed up in two of the book’s black and white photographs. At the top of a page we are shown Margaret, Denis and the Cabinet at the Carlton Club, celebrating her tenth anniversary as prime minister in 1989. She is the only woman present. And since the Carlton still does not allow women ...”

“... in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to ...”

“... to work through. Consider the terrible outbreak of plague in the 14th century known as the Black Death. Europe suffered disproportionately, losing perhaps 50 per cent of its total population. One result of this, however, was that the living standards and wages of many of those who survived seem to have improved. This, it has been suggested, led in time ...”