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“... visiting a son in the American South in 1927. When the bus leaves Washington for Virginia, the black passengers move silently to the back, segregating the whole bus, except for Paley’s mother and older sister, who are sitting in what is now the wrong section. The driver asks them to move, but Paley’s mother refuses. ‘When I first tried to write this ...”

“... in Victoriana. Her sex-life has become lavishly promiscuous, though her resident lover, Charles, a black Old Etonian lawyer, has proved bisexual. Partly for commercial and partly for aesthetic reasons, Fanny buys an empty Victorian church in Birmingham, in the middle of an area scheduled for redevelopment as a Leisure Park. Fred Jobling, a middle-aged Council ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are everything to them. It is gross, but also comically inept: ‘I look in the mirror. Silvered black hair; gray lizardskin shoes’ – it’s a jigsaw of a Whistler speaking, not a person! Once he has put the pieces together, they proclaim: I am, like my mother, a broad-shouldered, slim-waisted woman with strong thighs; neither small-breasted nor ...”

“... published by Suhrkamp in block colours with a single, contrasting stripe. Orange, lemon, lime, black. I own about a foot and a half of these now, and am somehow still being caught out by further, half-familiar titles. Do I own a copy of Ich dachte an die goldenen Zeiten (‘I Thought about the Golden Times’), and if not, how not? Does it exist? Hrabal in ...”

“... reasons the whole operation is taken over by the Americans – a bad lot, save for a solitary black one. There’s a sudden intensification of worry about the plans of the Oitarians on the Moon – who in fact want to colonise part of the Earth, since their own planet is becoming uninhabitable. With a crashing of narrative gears mankind is manoeuvred to ...”

“... the three of them barricade themselves with their luggage. One ends up shrugging at the rather black and white notations: the ‘air-raid sandwiches packed for him by his friend the chaplain, a whole package of sandwiches with plenty of sausage in them, and the terrible thing was that they tasted so good’, ‘the schnapps was excellent,’ ‘they were ...”

“... will serve our democracy.’ It sits alongside a picture of a snarling and dagger-toothed black dog, advertising the building’s thorough security arrangements. In the room where the meeting is to be held, officials of Obasanjo’s People’s Democratic Party mill around while a television in the corner shows a documentary about the transatlantic ...”

“... traitor is executed, and the film ends with detailed verbal information, in white letters on a black screen, about the deaths of all the remaining four chief characters we have met, not too long after the events of the film. Three others have died in the course of the story. But as you can probably tell even from this quick and nasty summary, the film is ...”

“... in the film. They meet at the roller-coaster, talk business, take a ride. Slater, who has a shaggy black crew cut, and talks and grins like Jack Nicholson without a mind, is shown full face on the swooping ride, delighted, obviously having such an uncomplicated good time that he has entirely forgotten his drug sale and its dangers and his prospects. Or if he ...”

“... race, sex and the loss of political innocence of the novel’s young male narrator, offspring of a black father and white mother, take the work far beyond the category of topical satire. Anonymous has been strongly influenced by All the King’s Men (1946). His narrator, Henry Burton, the preppy, intellectual grandson of a ...”

“... they look like a wall ready for papering. Backgrounds overlaid with strong accents in brown and black or with patches of red, blue and green, bright as flags on a yacht. The whole articulated by hard pencil lines, some ruled, some making simple curves and circles. All of these things can be found both in Ben Nicholson’s landscapes and still lifes and in ...”

“... commuter who has channelled her mother’s Jamaican roots into consistent solidarity with the black culture and community of her adopted American homeland while simultaneously refusing to lose sight of the complexity of her own perspective as the daughter of a working-class white Englishman. In the essay ‘Speaking in Tongues’ from her first ...”

“... the lusting Breedt. There is a Shakespeare-spouting polyglot: the Thembu manservant April, whose black features wear a white mask contrived by Quinn and mutilated by Breedt. There is Breedt’s wife, fresh from a Boer War concentration camp and challenged by April’s rebellious son. And as each chases the other round and round, like figures in some ...”

“... Conrad Black is not the only tycoon to have dreamed of global domination while buying and selling newspapers, and he is not the only tycoon to have had people fawning over him on the way up and shunning him on the way down; he is not the only tycoon to have lived large, issued writs and faced criminal charges; but he is the only tycoon with a wholly distinctive prose style ...”