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“... Sam​ Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) was one of the first British novels to be written in creolised English. It turned London, as the critic Susheila Nasta has said, into a ‘Black city of words’. The protagonist, Moses Aloetta, is an Afro-Trinidadian who arrived early in the Windrush era. After almost a decade in the city, he has become a reluctant welfare officer for newcomers: ‘All sorts of fellars start coming straight to his room … when they land up in London from the West Indies, saying that so and so tell them that Moses is a good fellar to contact, that he would help them get place to stay and work to do ...”

“... from James Fenimore Cooper through Owen Wister, Zane Grey and John Ford to Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. His subject is the well-known tautology that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. For Mitchell, the Western novel is essentially theatrical – a stage on which male identity is enacted, as well as a form of cinema avant la lettre. He ...”

“... he shared with Eleanor Brewer, the former wife of the New York Times Middle East correspondent, Sam Brewer, and disappeared. It was six months before the Soviets announced that he had defected to Moscow and another five years before the British government fully acknowledged what had happened. Philby lived for four years on rue Kantari with Eleanor, by the ...”

“... grass not far from the garden swing and the old plum tree. I was a bit bored and listless. I had a white sunhat on and I was idly shovelling sand with a small tin seaside spade, red with a wooden handle. Carol was a bit further down the lawn away from the house. Gradually she began to wander down the garden further and further away from the house and away from ...”

“... Timmie’s iron passes back and forth; the sheets over which she labours are transformed into the white page on which her experience is preserved:if you had heard herchanting as she ironedyou would understand form and lineand discipline and order andAmerica.Like many accounts of Black folksong from the early 20th century, Clifton’s poem describes for an ...”

“... of the southern Spain of Cocaine Nights, ‘one is aware of the exact volumes of these generally white apartments and hotel rooms’ – he also recognises the licence this anonymity provides: ‘The office workers and secretaries all behave like petty criminals vaguely on the run.’ Estrella de Mar and Eden-Olympia are very different developments: one is ...”

“... a disfiguring plane crash. Charlie escapes from Morocco and travels to Paris with his mechanic, a white Russian called Ivan Konovalchik; they then attempt to win the Orteig Prize for the first crossing between Paris and New York, an award eventually claimed by Lindbergh travelling the other way. The Forger develops a number of these plots: Charlie Halifax is ...”

“... of worldly renown: The Jetavana Temple bells ring the passing of all things. Twinned sal trees, white in full flower, declare the great man’s certain fall. The arrogant do not long endure: They are like a dream one night in spring. The bold and brave perish in the end: They are as dust before the wind. As Tyler explains in a footnote, the Jetavana Temple ...”

“... the microscope, and likewise mirthless, amidst an assault of mirth. Daffy, Tweetie Bird, Yosemite Sam – each of them intriguing, but Bugs, Bugs Bunny, having quite a time of it out there on the other side of the curtain, is who most commands the attention of M. Ponge, lapsed surrealist, champion of the apple in all its apple-ness, and so on. Is it the ...”

“... dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the ...”

“... members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often programmatic, was still infused with the raw brashness of tongues only recently ...”

“... Levin was found strangled in Central Park in New York City on an August morning in 1986. She was white, pretty, 18, and she travelled in the wealthy circle of New York’s private-school set. Her murderer, who had secretly watched the police collect the body from across the street, confessed a few hours later. He was Robert Chambers, 19, another member of ...”

“... something about himself: ‘This thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine.’ Is he assuming the white man’s burden or admitting that Caliban’s brutality may have something to do with imprisonment, torture and forced labour? One might even wonder whether, back home, Prospero will experience the uneasy notion that he’s never actually been to a desert ...”

“... the old South Africa lying round the house, it would be easy to write off Dave and Barry and their white hunting friends as recalcitrant Old Rhodies. But quite wrong. They are all in Africa because, like me, they can’t imagine being anywhere else and have happily embraced majority rule as the only right thing. They speak Shona and SiNdebele just as fluently ...”

“... took Miley’s place in 1929) and the trombonist Joe Nanton, whose nickname ‘Tricky Sam’ projected the essence of ‘jungle’ techniques. Following the example of King Oliver, they developed a wider variety of often speech-like growling and wa-wa sounds by humming and/or gargling gutturally in their throats while blowing legitimate musical ...”