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“... understanding of Marxism. By the 1970s he is writing in New Society about Victor Serge and Walter Benjamin, independent Marxists who were opposed to the Party line or idiosyncratic in their interpretation of Marxist theory. Serge was a former anarchist who was soon expelled from the Party and ended up as a ‘left oppositionist’, disenchanted with Stalinism ...”

“... informers on the other.Given these prejudices, it’s lucky that it was not I but the fair-minded Benjamin Nathans who set out to write the history of Soviet dissidents. He likes them, but stays this side of idolatry. Their appeal as oddballs with strong, if not always logical, convictions and an instinctive resistance to authority is clear from his ...”

“... and resourceful, as submissive and difficult, as it had to be for the sake of his mission.Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust’To create in myself a nation with its own politics, parties and revolutions, and to be all of it, everything, to be God in the real pantheism of this people-I.Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietIt is the first or Christian ...”

“... Catholic. He was still only in his early twenties, and it was understandable perhaps that when Benjamin Haydon saw him at a court ball he looked like a ‘kept pet, frightened to sit, frightened to stand’. That he managed to make a success of his marriage and find a role in public life speaks powerfully of Albert’s sense of duty, his patience and his ...”

“... shed, but he opposed the efforts of Oxford’s rising liberals to tidy up Christianity. He found Benjamin Jowett’s Hegelised Plato a poor substitute for St Paul and skipped Matthew Arnold’s poetry lectures because they clashed with cricket matches. All the same, he thrived. He won a fellowship at Merton. He translated French roundelays and befriended ...”

“... chin, pending below an ever open mouth ... he wore on a monumental nose a pair of pince-nez with a black ribbon to them.’ The full description occupies a long paragraph and is a touch overwritten but remains remarkable, and Marching Spain is an observant and enjoyable book. The years of self-imposed exile notwithstanding, Pritchett was from the start an ...”

“... spent their brief, uneasy childhoods in clay nests alongside siblings, small, mad planets, black as forest berries. This looping through sensation, through layerings of metaphor and whimsy, this tracing of delicate aerial patternings, this speeding instability is what you get in Zagajewski. Contraries – hard and soft, timidity and boldness, silence ...”

“... since 1917. Perhaps he means the most original Marxist thinker, but even that is dubious. Walter Benjamin is surely a better qualified candidate for that title. Even the most erudite students of Marxism, however, will find themselves learning from these essays. It is, for example, part of the stock-in-trade of historical materialism that Marx broke ...”

“... was the crisis in Anglicanism, and Symonds was in any event one of the unlikelier products of Benjamin Jowett’s Balliol. But the Apostolic practice of unsparing self-analysis and the Apostolic ideal of absolute honesty and openness with one’s intellectual intimates certainly fed into the late Victorian revolt against repression and hypocrisy. It is ...”

“... start of the Iraq War; they impelled him to fill in the blank spots on the maps, to register the black sites somehow. Thus Limit Telephotography (2005-present), his series of photographs of remote surveillance systems and clandestine military operations taken with high-powered lenses usually at a great distance (as far as sixty miles away) and often on land ...”

“... is I had the best fucking fifteen years of my life.’ Peters quotes the former New Zealand All Black Carl Hayman, talking about his early-onset dementia: ‘I was a commodity, and I understood that … It’s like that scene in [Band of Brothers] when the guy tells the bloke with shell shock: “When you accept you’re dead, you can function as a ...”

“... language’ have been defined, for at least three centuries, as universal. In France there is no black novel, no Jewish novel and certainly no gay novel, although a black Caribbean writer such as Patrick Chamoiseau can win the Goncourt and many French writers have been Jewish or homosexual or both. In Britain the situation ...”

“... music improved vigilance, mental alertness and working efficiency; in 1972 Black & Decker reported a 1.42 per cent gain in productivity once music by Muzak was installed, while, at St Joseph’s Hospital in Yonkers, NY, Dr Frank B. Flood, chief of cardiology, saw improved recovery rates in the intensive care unit.From the start, the two ...”

“... took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio, and Lewis, impassive beneath his trademark wide black hat, seemed content to watch in silence. ‘Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible,’ Hemingway wrote. So wide was the margin between master ...”

“... Author​ of the anti-racist jeremiad Black Skin, White Masks; spokesman for the Algerian Revolution and author of The Wretched of the Earth, the ‘bible’ of decolonisation; inspiration to Third World revolutionaries from the refugee camps of Palestine to the back streets of Tehran and Beirut, Harlem and Oakland; founder, avant la lettre, of post-colonialism; hero to the alienated banlieusards of France, who feel as if the Battle of Algiers never ended, but simply moved to the cités: Frantz Fanon has been remembered in a lot of ways, but almost all of them have foregrounded his advocacy of resistance, especially violent resistance ...”