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“... three books under review. The most important, the most detailed and the most scholarly is that by Eugene Black. The central question he seeks to answer is deceptively simple. How did the Jewish cousinhood, the Rothschilds, the Samuels, the Cohens and their relatives, all of whom were proudly élitist and profoundly assimilationist in their ...”

“... if one wants to understand the politics of the community in its formative years, one must read Eugene Black; the arrival of East European Jewry has been illuminatingly detailed by Lloyd Gartner; the career of Lord Jakobovits, the present Chief Rabbi’s predecessor, has been better analysed by Chaim Bermant, as has the role of the Jewish grandees, or ...”

“... Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage throws light on the process by which slavery became exclusively black. There were many European precedents for white slavery, not only in the classical period but in the trading networks of the late medieval Mediterranean. The word ‘slave’ derives from sclavus, or Slav, and the vast majority of slaves in Western Europe ...”

“... In 1965 Eugene Genovese published his first book, The Political Economy of Slavery, a stunning reinterpretation of the antebellum South. Although he wrote as a Marxist, he revived the bourgeois critique of slavery most closely associated with Adam Smith. The class conflict that might have driven the history of the South was stifled, he argued, by the slave owners’ paternalism towards their slaves and by their hegemony over farmers who did not own slaves ...”

“... Sixties he and his colleagues at the University of Chicago could ignore the distress of a young black assistant professor, Paul Moses, who declared that he would no longer teach Huckleberry Finn because he found the portrayal of Jim offensive. Booth remembers with more than a twinge of conscience that he and his colleagues found the challenge to Mark ...”

“... It is in some ways unfortunate that Tchaikovsky set Eugene Onegin to music, not Rossini, the composer of deep shallows. Pushkin, according to T.J. Binyon’s remarkable biography, became ‘addicted’ to Rossini while living in Odessa, where an Italian opera company was visiting, and though Binyon makes nothing of it, it rather blares at us, as writers’ tastes in music so often do (Joyce’s love of Puccini, for instance, or Auden’s dislike of Brahms ...”

“... family romance, as the book is subtitled, with added Aids, kilims and inheritance threats. Eugene Roth, who ran a sickle-cell anaemia clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital, was the son of a man who married for money and to get on, and he suffered as a child would under those circumstances. He called himself and his family ‘middle class’, which included ...”

“... a pity party among American playwrights, the antisocial, alcoholic, self-dramatising misery named Eugene Gladstone O’Neill would win the door prize. At the age of 21, already making a myth of his sense of doom, O’Neill was calling himself ‘the Irish luck kid’. By then, he’d been thrown out of Princeton (‘Ego’ was his nickname), fathered a son ...”

“... The hard information is pathetic. On each page the word ‘confidential’ is crossed out in heavy black ink and marked ‘Declassified on 11/4/97’. Page 1 reads: Foreign Service of the United States of America American Embassy Paris 8, France. Date: December 28, 1955 To: Director FBI From: Legat, Paris Subject: ELIZABETH WINIFRED B. KELLY ...”

“... response to an anti-literary countryside was to make literature. His masterpiece, the verse novel Eugene Onegin, opens with the protagonist’s uncle dying in his manor house.* Later, the house, the estate and its serfs pass to Onegin, who, sated with Petersburg high society, moves to the country to take possession. He finds a pastoral idyll of a house above ...”

“... Dufresnes, 12 years old, ‘sturdily built, like a small badger, with round cheeks, a sharp nose, black hair bobbed short, a thin, determined little mouth’. When she was a baby, her big brother Robin was murdered, hanged from the tree in the front yard on Mother’s Day. The culprit has never been found. It’s a bizarre crime: this is not how children get ...”

“... a place of lush temptations and hazards – of bubbling geysers, sweet-briared verandas and black thighs. It is a place where a family’s lives are narrowed by an oppressive father – while the father’s own fantasy and fancy wander. It is also a place where the family’s maid-servants, though preyed upon by their master, are in the end allowed ...”

“... north wind ablaze with lightning, rushing from Aphrodite accompanied by parching madnesses, black, unastonishable, powerfully, right up from the bottom of my feet [it] shakes my whole breathing being. [fr. 286 as ‘Woman’s Constancy’ by John Donne] In woman, on the one hand, those contracts being purposed by change and falsehood, where ...”

“... Monde, a part in a continuous historical play I was helping to write all day, white-tie reception, black-tie dinner, five-star brandy and five-star dreams: a canter in the Bois … Maxim’s … So there I was in a dim Chancery, all day the very model of a modern Second Secretary, reviewing files on Molotov or drafting, when the show-trial circus ...”

“... and break into rich people’s houses, selling the silver and valuables they steal on the black market. When she becomes pregnant with Carlo’s child, she must decide how committed she truly is to the cause. Carlo’s mother, Giulia, meanwhile, remembers the poverty of her childhood in an Italian village and worries about her son’s ...”