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“... was named is not dead at all: he was secretly adopted by a childless rich couple and rechristened Michael Abyad; now a doctor, he lives in America and makes occasional visits to Beirut and the Palestinian Centre for Research. A few days after hearing the story Anton sees a magazine picture of a man standing by a bicycle, looking at bodies in the aftermath of ...”

“... deputy prime minister (Charles Dance) as part of a repeatedly thwarted scheme to depose the PM (Michael Gambon) – is so outraged by the abuse directed at the government by the leader of the opposition, at the disrespect being shown to his posse, that he rises from his seat and crosses the chamber, in heroic slow motion, through a forest of arms raised in ...”

“... It must be confessed, without apology, that I was a noticeable Leftie in 1968: I was editing the Black Dwarf, a magazine I intended to promote socialist ideas for working-class readers. It was welcomed, however, by a quite different readership – the ‘student generation in revolt’ of Ronald Fraser’s title – and I was made to surrender my editorship ...”

“... million. His rise to fame, fortune and notice in the financial press had begun in the pitch-black economy with a little moonlighting, a hired garage, a gang of welders and 100 flotation tanks. Everything he has touched (since his first business went bankrupt, that is) has turned into tenners. What a triumph for supply-side economics! The trouble, as ...”

“... Which is just what happened, so we’ve always been told, to the French at Crécy.In his new book, Michael Livingston argues that we have got nearly everything about Crécy wrong. The standard story has been told many times by historians and by novelists, including by Bernard Cornwell twenty years ago in Harlequin. (Cornwell has written a generous foreword to ...”

“... fishermen found another body washed up on a sandbank. It was identified as that of Atabong Michael Atembe, aged 32, also from Cameroon.The boat had sunk about 250 kilometres up the coast, near the state border with Oaxaca. I went there on a quad bike driven by a local teenager. The sand was littered with clothing. I made an inventory: a pair of ...”

“... articles; in AI-generated images (‘in thirty minutes of clicking he has landed on not a single Black face’); in a serial killer’s ability to evade capture for years (‘his victims were mostly Black women, many of them sex workers’); in the microaggressions he experiences as a ...”

“... with a charming little girl, as the bows bounce on her plaits; a gracious châtelaine with a young black boy and a darling little capering dog are engaged in something so outlandish that you look on shaken at the filth materialising under your eyes. ‘Auntie Walker’s Samplers’, the new works on the walls in Camden Arts Centre, made in situ for one of the ...”

“... in Richmond, California, a town in the East Bay, north of Oakland and Berkeley, whose thriving Black communities maintained cultural and affective ties to Southern culture through music, religion and food. She enrolled in adult education classes and by the early 1960s was working as a nurse while promoting a burgeoning side venture as a maker of ‘Crazy ...”

“... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...”

“... of violence. The first is represented by the instance of a young woman shot from a lorry by the Black and Tans in Galway, the particular casualty behind the sharp, grim lines that goNow days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-freeThe going ...”

“... 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina. His reverence for the Virgin folded easily into his adoration of Hollywood’s golden age stars. But he also became something of a star himself. His early poems were inspired by queer desire and systematic derangement achieved ...”

“... facts that the narrator knows, or wants to know, about his parents and grandparents. In June 1914 Michael and Una O’Shaughnessy have a reason for their stay in Cornwall: to conceal the date of birth of their child, conceived out of wedlock. This child is Rene, who grows up in Dublin, Bray and Sandymount in the 1920s. In 1934 she is an actress in a touring ...”

“... literary renunciations or betrayals involved in writing as a privileged tourist, he does have two black central characters and speaks in their voices with the same confidence that he does in those of his white men and women. Davis Morel, an African-American holistic doctor, psychologist and militant anti-Christian polemicist newly arrived in Botswana, and ...”

“... his most genuine belief perhaps being that when he performed poetry readings ‘stripped to a black leather or satin posing-pouch’, the poems took on another meaning. No doubt: but one connected to Jeremy Reed rather than his poems. The last third of Kirkup’s book is given to the account of a love affair with a young American, ‘the most beautiful ...”