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“... troubled. Juneteenth is a set of fragments masquerading as a whole – a Frankenstein’s monster, Louis Menand called it in the New York Times – and the simple plot line that Callahan imposes for unifying effect violates the form Ellison imagined and failed to achieve in this disparate, untitled, unfinished work, several sections of which had already ...”

“... is what makes ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, in Walker’s terms, ‘sickly’. Henry LouisGates Jr called it ‘the most reviled poem in African American literature’. It contributed to the view of readers in the 1960s and 1970s who, informed by Black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement, found ...”

“... mulatto and house-nigger (Ariel) rather than a field-nigger (Caliban).’ In ‘Talking Black’, Henry LouisGates, searching for a black critical language with which to read black texts, describes the same problem from a different point of view. How can we write or read the text of ‘Blackness’? What ...”

“... African story he told were shown to be without empirical foundation. But none of this mattered. Henry LouisGates got it right when he said in a 1998 interview that Roots is a ‘work of the imagination’. This may be the reason it captured the imagination of millions and why genealogical work began a new phase of ...”

“... to the world: they beat out field chants with kitchen utensils (The Piano Lesson), do the ‘Joe Louis Victory Walk’ (Seven Guitars), perform voodoo to contact their drowned ancestors (Gem of the Ocean) and, of course, sing the blues. ‘White folks don’t understand about the blues,’ Ma Rainey says. ‘They hear it come out, but they don’t know how ...”

“... He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’: T.S. Eliot writing of Henry James in the Little Review of August 1918. I want to take exception, not to the truth of Eliot’s pronouncement (he was right about James), but to the set of lofty assumptions calmly towering behind it. The young Eliot’s epigram summed up with cutting brevity a creed that for Modernists appeared beyond dispute ...”

“... IV’s coronation being all the more preposterous for the hammering of his ex-wife-to-be at the gates. In those days, there was much anti-royal sentiment, and what appeared to be tradition was richly scoffed at: an English cartoon of the French Restoration contained the legend, ‘Son of Saint Louis, Ascend to Heaven. You ...”

“... Eventually a younger generation of African-American scholars, prominent among them Cornel West and Henry LouisGates Jr, came round and paid respects to The Confessions of Nat Turner, and some even designated Styron the inadvertent father of the postmodern slave narrative, but by then he may have been so bruised by the ...”

“... superiority. Even the Turk, who was obliterating a whole European army and hammering at the gates of Vienna just as Pizarro was butchering the Incas, was, by the 18th century, the Sick Man of Europe (the first of many), and could be rolled aside by the gallantry of Lawrence in the 20th. The events of the second half of the 20th century, especially those ...”

“... and hadn’t been independently tested. In January’s issue of Scientific American, Bill Gates predicted ‘a future in which robotic devices will become a nearly ubiquitous part of our day to day lives’. According to Gates, the South Korean government plans to get a domestic robot into all its households by ...”

“... of primitive and innocent reading experiences. Something very similar was aimed at by Robert Louis Stevenson, and in Our Ancestors Calvino has a beautiful description of the Stevensonian romance: ‘To him, writing meant translating an invisible text containing the quintessential fascination of all adventures, all mysteries, all conflicts of will and ...”

“... her received ideas. It is as if Sir Bertram had died and Fanny Price had slipped through the gates of Mansfield Park to see for herself what the family’s fortunes entailed in Jamaica: Phillips drew for his portraits on the literature of abolition, including such powerful witnesses as Olaudah Equiano, who wrote one of the most eloquent and detailed ...”

“... 1550 and 1672, from the dreadful spoliations of Charles V and Philip II to the deadly invasion of Louis XIV, a period comprising the Great Dutch Revolt, under the Princes of Orange and Nassau, the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) that resulted in the independent Dutch Republic, and the infamous Thirty Years War (1618-48). Perpetually metastasising religious ...”

“... a small anarchy, the members of which do not work together, but scramble against each other’. Henry James would refer to the capital’s ‘horrible numerosity’ and a ‘bigness … fatal to amenity’. But James also saw London as ‘the biggest aggregation of human life’, which – unlike Carlyle’s ‘huge aggregate’ – hints at an agency of ...”

“... my paper’. In any case, Wollstonecraft herself had been moved to tears when she saw Louis XVI being taken to his trial. This suspicion of tears in high places still burns hot and strong. After George Osborne wept at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, he was cross-questioned at some length on the Today programme by John Humphrys, who, as Dixon ...”