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“... the Enlightenment, the liberal idealist Ernst Cassirer faced down the philosopher and future Nazi Martin Heidegger. Observers claimed Heidegger won that debate. A German Jew who would go into exile four years later, Cassirer had urged his contemporaries to look into ‘that bright clear mirror fashioned by the Enlightenment’ and to abandon their false ...”

“... was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were given their first chance by the FWP. Its ambition was to create – or rather to discover – a great American epic in the acts and words of ordinary men and women: to draw from the disregarded speech and customs of the people the underlying ...”

“... In​ 1942, Ralph Ellison had a meeting with Fredric Wertham, the director of psychiatric services at Queens General Hospital in New York. Ellison, who was eligible for the draft, didn’t want to join a segregated army. A friend had suggested that Wertham might find a way to get him a psychiatric deferment. Wertham, a German Jewish emigrant, sympathised, and though a deferment wasn’t needed in the end – a draft notice never showed up – their talks uncovered a shared indignation about the colour line in access to medical care ...”

“... William James, the most recent in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James (1980) and in Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001). No lack of attention, then, but Richardson’s book is ...”

“... had worked as a rancher and mule trainer.) In his essay ‘Hidden Name and Complex Fate’, Ralph Ellison, who reduced his middle name (Waldo) to a ‘simple and mysterious “W.”’, argued that African Americans – ‘especially if we are potential writers’ – may be ‘more than ordinarily concerned’ with the associations their names carry ...”

“... unfolded by reading about them in the Herald Tribune. Richard Wright remained in Paris. Neither Ralph Ellison nor Langston Hughes took part in the Civil Rights Movement (and Ellison took a dim view of Baldwin’s involvement), just as writers like Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney avoided active involvement in the public life of Northern Ireland after ...”

“... We know Fielding had patrons during the late 1740s and 1750s (among them Pope’s friend Ralph Allen and the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu) and did well from the subscription sales of her novels, but it’s less clear how Collier managed. The Cry was written and published during the years Fielding and Collier lodged together in London, in Beauford ...”

“... and Buckle, or in the garbled and inaccurate version edited by his curmudgeonly younger brother Ralph, who has high claims to be one of the worst editors in English history. It is nice to have the correct text, and quite a number of letters have not appeared in print before – in particular, a series which concerns his finances, letters to his legal ...”

“... like a footballer’s, showing a considerable expanse of thigh.’ Sounding unaccountably like Ralph Lynn in an Aldwych farce, Gielgud ventured to remark to Hicks: ‘I say, sir, that’s a remarkably attractive girl with M Guitry, don’t you think,’ and was rewarded with the trenchant comment: ‘Try acting with her old boy. It’s the cabman’s ...”

“... nostalgia. It is also a useful tool with which to work in the present. John Fowles begins Daniel Martin with the words: ‘Whole sight: or all the rest is desolation.’ But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that ...”

“... handcuffed by a white police officer while attempting to open his own front door; in 2012 Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old on his way home from a convenience store in Florida, was murdered by a neighbourhood watchman called George Zimmerman; in 2014 the killings of Brown and Eric Garner, an unarmed man from Staten Island who was choked to death by a ...”

“... years. Meanwhile Valerie had become a star of stage and screen. In one film she played opposite Ralph Richardson, whom she much liked, and Laurence Olivier, whom she did not, finding him selfish, offhand and cold. He was however preferable to Leslie Howard, who with his girlfriend for a time shared a house with the Havelock-Allans. Valerie’s best-known ...”

“... Jerry remarks to his sceptical black girlfriend, before making an uncomfortable allusion to Ralph Ellison: ‘I enjoyed being an alien. Fuck them. The invisible man. Fine.’ Perhaps more damagingly, Kelman’s satire on the US security industry is curiously tame. Not only has DeLillo done this kind of thing with greater gusto and vision, but Kelman has ...”

“... misuse history to advance their dangerous ideologies, and, at the other end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about Irving, but attacking Gray causes wrathful indignation among Holocaust dogmatists. I sought to learn from men who became monsters, such ...”

“... plaintive rider:I have completed the census form while strongly objecting to the agency, Lockheed Martin, that is carrying it out. Information of this nature should only be divulged to a government agency under the direct control of parliament. Lockheed is basically an arms manufacturer and thus not the most scrupulous of organisations. This is an undertaking ...”