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“... to revive the noblest political lineage of Europe, that of ‘Dr Johnson, Pitt the Younger, Burke, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury’. Some other recent world-histories have taken a stand against Euro-centrism, notably William McNeill’s A World History (1971) and J.M. Roberts’s The Hutchinson History of the World (1976). In this regard, Mr Thomas is a ...”

“... would neither pick his pocket nor break his leg? Soon after his death, a fellow Virginian, ‘Black Horse Harry’ Lee, weighed in with his malicious Observations on the Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1832), which told a story of base deception focused on Jefferson’s betrayal of George Washington. In 1837, Francis Lister Hawks revived the charges of ...”

“... elaborate distancing from the feel of the photographic – the blurring and smearing, the way black and white seem to drift towards a weaker, less inflected, more listless overall grey – end up achieving? What does the artist do to the ‘photographic’ and the ‘painted’, as he receives the categories from the culture at ...”

“... his brethren’ – and this text was used by Early Modern Europeans to justify the translation of black Africans into the doleful state of chattel slavery. I can’t remember anyone in the whole Shakespearean oeuvre who shows any zest for physical labour except the gravedigger in Hamlet. The Bard’s own works, however, have been regarded with almost the ...”

“... a turnip – there is an echo here of Wyndham Lewis’s appraisal of her ‘prose-song … a cold, black suet-pudding … Cut it at any point, it is the same thing … all fat, without nerve’ – but also a literary aristocrat, an ‘aesthetician’ of ‘Methuselah prodigiousness’, ‘dandyish in her handsome wools and velvety in her sentences’ because ...”

“... been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.’ Lincoln was a Republican, of course, but John Kerry’s journey has been a very modern one for a Democrat, a journey around every aspect of himself and every issue pressing in America, cutting and rounding and paring away as he goes, making jigsaw ...”

“... on our way to a bookshop. Sontag was wearing her trademark intellectual-diva outfit: voluminous black top and black silky slacks, accessorised with a number of exotic, billowy scarves. These she constantly adjusted or flung back imperiously over one shoulder, stopping now and then to puff on a cigarette or expel a series ...”

“... was handled: foul-smelling industries, the manufacture of ordnance, brewing, confectionery, black smoke palls and sickly-sweet perfumes. The cloacal mud of low tide mingled deliriously with sulphurous residues trapped in savage greenery: the bindweed, thorns and dark berries of the riverside path. The peninsula thrives on secrecy. For as long as anyone ...”

“... He had brought along what I’d asked to see. And he pulled out a lined school jotter bound in black linen: there were the poems. They were all he had. They were thirty-odd in number. They filled the thin notebook with their beautiful, crisp handwriting, which ran smoothly and evenly, without anything unruly or fancy. It was rare for a single word to be ...”

“... illustration. Guenther acknowledges the success of Nazi male chic – those ravishing, stiff black SS uniforms so romanticised in movies – but only to exclude men’s fashion from her account. She instead makes clear why there could be no Nazi chic for women. Since the 18th century, Jews had created and purveyed virtually all German elegance; and under ...”

“... of specimens and landscapes); and four servants from his Lincolnshire estate (two of them black). His luggage included a pair of greyhounds, a dog and a bitch called Lady (for hunting); a skiff (for netting marine specimens); a vast quantity of paper (for dried plants); glass cases, boxes and bottles; high-end optical instruments; fishing nets and ...”

“... cool, cruel blue to Townshend’s three-minute psychodrama – ‘I look all white/but my dad was black’ – was the brief, paradoxical flare of Mod: the story of how a small cabal of British jazz obsessives conducting a besotted affair with the style arcana of Europe and America somehow became an army of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous ...”

“... alive in Israeli air strikes; of women and children subsisting on 245 calories a day. This is what Benjamin Netanyahu describes as ‘the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism’.The military operation in Gaza has altered the shape, perhaps even the meaning, of the struggle over Palestine – it seems misleading, and even offensive, to ...”

“... American Andes played their melancholy flutes and on the pavements of New York, Paris and Rome black peddlers from West Africa sold trinkets to the natives as the natives’ ancestors had done on their trading voyages to the Dark Continent.’ Or when upper and middle-class youth start to take on the clothes, music and language of the urban poor. Strangely ...”

“... sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan in the metrically exuberant, sexually discreet translation of Benjamin Bickley Rogers. But the under-presence of the ancient freedom is everywhere, for those with ears to hear. The charge of not-quite-perfectly-concealed, intense homoerotic emotion in Housman’s scoutmasterish ‘love of comrades’ is a good example. It ...”