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“... by a rare combination of circumstances: they were both educated and free.Many black men married white Englishwomen. Diatribes against intermarriage appeared, written by men such as the plantation owner Edward Long. This shouldn’t be taken as clear proof of widespread hostility to interracial couples. Their descendants also intermarried and ...”

“... one of the last cottages to be burned down in an eviction.The detection of ‘savages beneath our white skins’ exhilarated him. He preferred H. Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson to Henry James, because their romances seemed to have a primitive gusto. Although Lang co-wrote a fantasy novel with Haggard, his most effective literary use of anthropology ...”

“... under whose Big Brotherly gaze they had been working. I concluded that if De Beers could sack white people on such a flimsy basis in good old democratic London, they were perfectly capable of designing special machines to sift through black miners’ shit in Kimberley and the Cape. It is 25 years since Laurie Flynn helped to occupy the London School of ...”

“... to ‘discover’ extinction in the sense of gaining actual experience of the phenomenon. But, as Michael Neill points out, human beings do imagine dying and in the process they inevitably invent a notion of death capable of matching their presuppositions. To that extent, death could be said to be something that each society discovers for itself. As a ...”

“... not to be confused with a novel of the same title by Anita Brookner). In the earlier book Michael Cullen left working-class Nottingham for the metropolis, fell into the proverbial bad company, and ended up as a convicted gold-smuggler. Now, having been abandoned by his wife after ten years of idleness in the Cambridgeshire village of Upper Mayhem, he ...”

“... of scarlet in evidence, in the robes of the assembled Council and of sundry invited academics, white in the vestments of the local clergy, and a respectable quantity of gold in the mayoral chains of office; there are any number of sombre grey suits on visiting diplomats and corporate sponsors; and outside the sunshine, if there is any, glints from the ...”

“... was plucked from the Marines to serve on the National Security Council, which is attached to the White House. This was, North is too shy to tell us, a political appointment. The Colonel was chosen because of his right-wing views, which were bolstered, as were the President’s, by fanatical born-again Christianity. North worked closely and happily under ...”

“... eventually succumbing to drug addiction, is an insistent presence in her work. Poems such as ‘White Phosphorus’ (1988), though written some years later, resound with atrocities witnessed and committed:‘And when he came back’  ‘from Nam’  ‘at first’  ‘he wanted’  ‘to go back’‘back there, was it where’  ‘he belonged ...”

“... Such arduous processes were nonetheless used to produce vast quantities of text. The late Michael Clanchy estimated that the English royal government put out around thirty thousand documents a year as early as the second half of the 12th century. Using the ingenious method of calculating the expenditure on the wax used to seal documents, Clanchy found ...”

“... by Alan Walker.* I was also reading – for amusement – the biography of Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd and one of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade. In Holroyd’s book, I was most struck by some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s ...”

“... covering of flesh was so transmuted with ecstasy that early passion became a heavenly embrace of white fiery flame. There are joys so complete, so all perfect, that one should not survive them. Ah why did not my burning soul find exit that night, and fly, like Blake’s angel, through the clouds of our earth to another sphere? These alarming words helped to ...”

“... off by the Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom for not cleaning behind the fridge), and not all of us were white: demographically unpromising candidates for membership in a party which is anyway tiny – an order of magnitude smaller than Labour or the Tories, its membership amounts to 0.06 per cent of the electorate. The amateur Ukip enthusiast may have meant only ...”

“... had bred 2123 dogs and owned 2696.They are often like this, the ‘Doggy People’ who feature in Michael Worboys’s study of twenty ‘eminent and not so eminent Victorians who were the modern dog’s makers’: muscular, energetic, eccentric, polymathic. Kathleen Pelham-Clinton, the Duchess of Newcastle, who imported the borzoi breed from Russia into ...”

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”

“... The grisliest scene in Reservoir Dogs concerns the torture of a policeman by Mr Blonde, played by Michael Madsen. The violence is funny, but it’s also hair-raising, haunting in insidious ways, not like the thuggishness of the moment I mentioned in Pulp Fiction. ‘I don’t know anything!’ the policeman says. ‘You can torture me if you want ...”