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“... on German literature and writing radio plays, Gert Hofmann began to produce disconcerting novels. Michael Hofmann, his son, the poet, confronted him head-on in his collection, Acrimony, and in 1987 wrote in the LRB (25 June) about the second of the novels to be translated into English, Our Conquest. This covers the first two days of peace in a small town in ...”

“... only, or chiefly, because of who wrote it. The background is pure white, the lettering scarlet and black. Not the expected livery for a book subtitled ‘A Documentary’ (but, as it happens, exactly the jacket colours of a recent mass-paperback humorous compilation by a woman about men). That subtitle does make its way onto the jacket (insofar as authors ...”

“... Leone Company – a British philanthropic corporation founded in 1792 for the resettlement of black soldiers who had served as loyalists in the American War of Independence – used legitimate commerce to weaponise African consumption against the slave trade and slavery. This was the reason Benson was so concerned about his soaked tobacco: if local ...”

“... the second collection of poems by Cortney Lamar Charleston (Haymarket, £12), describes growing up Black in white suburbia. In ‘Hip-Hop Introspective’:Kids ask what FUBU means. White girls look at meconstantly. DMX never seems to be screaming.The underground heads north on my playlistswhile an old poster peels away from the wall.I’m beside myself almost ...”

“... cities nearer the coast. The city’s patron deity was Elagabal, whose immanent form was a conical black stone. His priests, of whom Julius Bassianus was chief, were still socially dominant in the region (they were perhaps, but by no means certainly, descended from the extinct royal dynasty). Bassianus had two daughters, Maesa and Domna. Severus, by then a ...”

“... and with fickle and disturbing acts of imaginative murder, usually (perhaps unsurprisingly in his black-and-while world) on policemen: ‘So lively, that policewoman regulating the traffic, putting her white gloved fingers to her lips and blowing kisses at a baby – and yet it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see her stone dead the next minute.’ And ...”

“... the One Hundred Years of Solitude type (specifically, a variant of Ursula’s life), only with a black or malevolent feeling. The result is not satisfactory, and may have suggested to Garcia Marquez that the idiom of One Hundred Years of Solitude has, ethically or judgmentally, an affirmative tendency. He has returned to the problem more recently in The ...”

“... however, although admirable in themselves, lend to dilute and confuse what might have been a fine black comedy. ‘She was surprisingly strong for a dead woman,’ notes Victor, as he struggles to disengage himself from the clutches of his first victim. There are other contradictions in the book. The racy style of the narrative is at odds with Victor’s ...”

“... results. Those who harbour hope for a fair trial for Saddam need only look to America’s ‘legal black hole’ in Cuba to realise how unlikely a prospect that is. Kofi Annan has recently been pressing for a much more significant role for the UN in Iraq. Blue-helmeted troops could make a significant contribution to bringing peace to the country; they could at ...”

“... one would probably do better to read the infant Rilke. One might read Bernhard: Spring of black flowers, you are driven by an endless wind from the north, I will sleep, tomorrow the snow and solitude will already cover me after your shoes …But one might as well read Celan, or perhaps merely something histrionic translated from the Spanish. One might ...”

“... through long association with the colonial setting, and … the word was then also applied to black African slaves born in the island or territory. Only more recently … did the term Creole come to designate a person of mixed African and European blood in certain settings.‘Édouard Glissant,’ Scholar says, ‘defined créolisation as the process ...”

“... show everything as though it enabled harmony and represented plenty: ‘Her hair lay thick and black on the pillow, and beyond her lay the garden, the thicket of cherry trees, covered two and threefold in white flower buds; and the short, squat chimney of the sawmill where we used to play cowboys and Indians.’ Descriptions in the pedantically realistic ...”

“... Bill’s advisers bullet-pointing paperbacks composed by a peripatetic, a white man who wrote in black-face. Griffin does not aspire to Easy’s confidential charm, his bright-eyed savvy, his innocence. He’s a white man’s black, darker in spirit, thwarted and confused. And New Orleans, the setting for Sallis’s ...”

“... malevolent, piteous or merely inaccurate, ought to be wound up after the publication of Michael Straight’s contribution. Very possibly, Anthony Blunt will one day write such a book himself. But the names have almost all been named, the questions of motive worn smooth, the titles and pensions (some of them) stripped like epaulettes, the spell in ...”

“... Though it does not say so, Michael Powell’s 700-page autobiography is merely the first volume of a work which Powell rather surprisingly tells us is ‘what my mother would have wished and what I was born for’. Surprising not for the reference to his mother, since he always speaks of her with the greatest affection and respect, but for the seeming dedication to letters in a man who never ceases to proclaim his lifelong devotion to images ...”