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“... novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James Baldwin described Native Son as a modern-day Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy’, arguing that Bigger Thomas ‘admits the possibility of his being subhuman’ and that Wright was ...”

“... activist, which allowed Franzen to go whole hog on the rottenness of techno-capitalism. When James Meek reviewed the novel for the LRB (24 September 2015), he argued that too much of it read like ‘extracts from workaday op-eds’ and regretted that Franzen was more invested in the Assange-ish character than in the storyline about a young woman trying ...”

“... advocate, but she was unequivocally disdainful about the integrationists from the North. When James Baldwin toured the southern states in 1957, O’Connor had the opportunity to meet him. She chose not to. Her excuse was that she had to observe ‘the traditions of the society I feed on’. But perhaps it is also true that she felt tainted. Perhaps ...”

“... Mazzini, say, to a variety of Asian nationalists: Gandhi and Savarkar in India, Liang Qichao and James Sanua in Egypt (figures explored in his fascinating book of 2012, From the Ruins of Empire). Mishra’s model isn’t just Rousseau himself, but the superfluous man of 19th-century literature who reappears in all modernising countries: the ‘alienated ...”

“... force on the part of the police.In his letter from Harlem in 1960, ‘Fifth Avenue, Uptown’, James Baldwin writes that the police officer moves through the inner citylike an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country; which is precisely what, and where, he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes … He can retreat from his uneasiness ...”

“... However you construe the evidence, Cambridge was a victim of what the historian of slavery James Walvin calls ‘plantocratic revenge’: legal or irregular retribution – whipping, shackling, lynching – that was used to punish rebellious behaviour or to make an example of someone in order to deter revolt. ‘Scratch a planter,’ Walvin ...”

“... Lillian Hellman, Isaiah Berlin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Harry Levin, W.H. Auden, Malraux, James Baldwin, Stravinsky, Robert Lowell etc. None of these people, however, furnishes Wilson with anything like a satisfying number of thoughtful passages in the journals. This is partly a result of misleading editing by Lewis Dabney, who divides the book ...”

“... Cabin. Melville’s Babo – intelligent and coldly resolute – would find no place in what James Baldwin called the ‘virtuous sentimentality’ of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Yet it was Stowe’s novel, with its messianic depiction of black suffering, that fuelled the crisis of the 1850s. Melville’s work made no impression on the anti-slavery ...”

“... such as ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, ‘Alas, Poor Richard’ and ‘Many Thousands Gone’, James Baldwin rejected the role of ‘Negro writer’ and ‘categorisation’ more generally; Irving Howe defended Wright in ‘Black Boys and Native Sons’; then Ellison, caught in the crossfire as the author of Invisible Man, shot back at Howe in ‘The ...”

“... images and exhausted subjects; from Glen Ligon’s black on black painting of a paragraph from a James Baldwin essay to Chohreh Feyzdjou’s smearing of black pigment on jars and boxes that contain the scrolled text of her autobiography. As Enwezor envisaged, many ‘new relations of spectatorship’ were introduced, relations which drew on the tragic ...”

“... was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent ...”

“... party, came dressed as Henry VIII and fed lion meat to his guests. Back in the mutinous 1960s, James Baldwin promised a ‘fire next time’. But the fire this time comes in cool, ironic novels like Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. When Oliver Stone released his satirical movie Wall Street, the business press embraced the slick financial ...”

“... a quarter of a century ago, supplies one clue. The narrator is set off by a recollection of Henry James, who after fifty years remembered ‘a boy cousin being sketched in the nude at Newport before his life was “cut short, in a cavalry clash, by one of the Confederate bullets of 1863” ’.Death, summer, youth – this triad contrives to haunt me every ...”

“... of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger ...”

“... integration than the Protestants had, but never pushed its views. O’Connor was prepared to meet James Baldwin in New York City but not in Georgia, where it would upset people (presumably white ones), something she could see no point in: ‘I observe the traditions of the society I feed on – it’s only fair.’ Sometimes she referred to the South as ...”